[OS X TeX] Please test this: (Modified by Gerben Wierda)

[Gerben Wierda]

> On Aug 24, 2005, at 7:49 AM, Gerben Wierda wrote:
>
>>
>> On Aug 24, 2005, at 13:41, Vince McGarry wrote:
>>
>>> Ok. My results were so different from every other result I saw for a
>>> comparable machine that I wondered why. Here's my original result:
>>>
>>> 1.25Ghz G4 PowerBook 10.4.2        53.53 real        21.50 user
>>>   6.87 sys
>>>
>>> Several runs produced comparable results. Here is the result I get
>>> after shutting down all active programs other than the terminal and
>>> the finder.
>>>
>>> 1.25Ghz G4 PowerBook 10.4.2        27.53 real        20.86 user
>>>   5.61 sys
>>>
>>> This is quite a difference.
>>>
>> Not really. user+sys is what count.
>
> 500MHz Ti powerbook 10.3.9 	103.24 real        62.99 user        14.72
> sys (6 apps running)
> 500MHz Ti powerbook 10.3.9	  72.55 real        57.76 user        12.70
> sys (2 apps running)

OK, let me be more precise. It is indeed true that if there are many
processes, your own process also takes longer by itself. The reasons are
probably that the memory of your process is swapped out, that your data is
not in the file system cache or the cache on disk, etc. 77.71 versus 70.46
for user+sys is the effect of such inefficiencies. Still ,that is a 10%
error. If you interpret thses figures, you can look at the difference
between user+sys and real to see how heavily taxed the machine was.

This is not really a scientific test ;-)

G

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