2008-04-29, 09:41(-05), Ed Morton:
[...]
> Just curious - is there a way to specify that a given process must be run on
> just one processor? Seems like the "time" output for "user" and "sys" might be
> more useful in that case if you want to compare apples...
[...]

In both cases (while read loop vs awk), there was only one
process running at a time, so it shouldn't make a big
difference.

In any case, the "real" timing has little significance wrt to
measuring performance as it may take into account the time spent
to run other processes. The user+sys is significant in that it's
the quantity of CPU cycles that are needed to perform the task
(note that the amount of work that has to be done may vary from
one run to the next, in that you may or may not have to move
pages of code or data around in between cache, memory,
permanent/network... storage).

It shouldn't change significantly if you assign all the
threads to a same processor or several. Of course though, that
doesn't take into account the time waiting for IO like for
instance when loading the executables/libraries/data into
memory.

--
Stéphane