1. how sum of system time and user time can be greater than real time ?
2. Even though my program is not waiting for any I/O the real time is smaller than system time as shown


root@chaitu:/home/chaitu/Desktop/Chk# time ./new

real 0m0.001s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.004s

Awaiting a reply.

I think thats because the computer is faster than real time - 'Wall Clock Time'

For example.

Real time might be 1 minute.

But the computer can do 600 minutes of work in 1 minute. Its been a long time since I've studied this, so please correct me if I am mistaken.

thanks for ur reply..
the things which I know regarding this are:

real time is the actual elapsed time(from beginning to end of the program)
user time includes time needed for executing user defined code.
System time for executing system calls(kernel time).

but I am confused as to how system time can be greater than real time. even i am not clear with it.

just waiting for someone to answer.

Chaitanya.

I don't understand. What's a "minute of work", anyway? How can a computer do in 1/600 of a minute what it could do in a minute?

This thing would be of great help for me.
Someone can please explain it.


--
Chaitanya

It is absolutely logical that sometimes the wall clock time (real) is smaller than the sum of sys and user time.

Sys and user time is the time that CPU spends within the process. If you have an application with multithreading, then the time could be larger than that of real.

Also real time could be way larger than the sum of sys and user time, because of blocking actions like IO.

Real time on a PC with a CPU is referring to clock time of the CPU, to call and execute a function call in real time is -- "right now" without delay, this is machine language that manipulates the hardware of the system, whereas software has a delay to it due to having to go through the API or a driver therefore, not actually speaking to the hardware directly. Hence a delay in time occurs due to this effect of having to go through a proxy of sorts first before the hardware actually receives the call to do something. It is not real time programming but that other one which the name of it escapes me at this moment.

Real-time computing
therefore anything other programming will be slower then "real time" if it is not machine code assembly language.

Actually, the most likely explanation in this case is that your times are just too small to measure (meaningfully). When you're dealing in the realm of "0.00x seconds," 'irrelevant curiosities' (ahem...) may appear.