The timing commands

Use the timing commands for testing and debugging programs whose performance you are recording and trying to improve.

The output from the time command is in minutes and seconds, as follows:

real    0m26.72s
user    0m26.53s
sys     0m0.03s

The output from the timex command is in seconds, as follows:

real 26.70
user 26.55
sys  0.02

Comparing the user+sys CPU time to the real time will give you an idea if your application is CPU-bound or I/O-bound.

Note: Be careful when you do this on an SMP system. For more information, see time and timex Cautions).

The timex command is also available through the SMIT command on the Analysis Tools menu, found under Performance and Resource Scheduling. The -p and -s options of the timex command enable data from accounting (-p) and the sar command (-s) to be accessed and reported. The -o option reports on blocks read or written.