From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Apr 28 19:29:41 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.spot.org (blackhole.spot.org [65.120.117.140]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id C019B37B41A for ; Sun, 28 Apr 2002 19:29:35 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 9645 invoked from network); 29 Apr 2002 02:29:29 -0000 Received: from localhost.spot.org (HELO spot.org) (127.0.0.1) by localhost.spot.org with SMTP; 29 Apr 2002 02:29:29 -0000 Received: from 65.164.19.137 (SquirrelMail authenticated user dan@spot.org) by webmail.spot.org with HTTP; Sun, 28 Apr 2002 22:29:29 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <3749.65.164.19.137.1020047369.squirrel@webmail.spot.org> Date: Sun, 28 Apr 2002 22:29:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: Re: login.conf variables From: "Daniel B. Hemmerich" To: In-Reply-To: <20020429100737.C56548@k7.mavetju.org> References: <20020429100737.C56548@k7.mavetju.org> X-Priority: 3 Importance: Normal X-MSMail-Priority: Normal Reply-To: dan@spot.org X-Mailer: SquirrelMail (version 1.2.5) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Ah, thank you very much Edwin. It is very appreciated. > On Sun, Apr 28, 2002 at 07:03:06PM -0400, Daniel B. Hemmerich wrote: >> I have tried to find out exactly what CPUTIME really is. I was hoping >> someone could provide a somewhat decent explanation of this for me. > > The amount of seconds a process is on the CPU. > > In a multitasking environment, the kernel decides which program is > running. Running means, not waiting for something else. > > If you run `top', you'll see that a lot of processes are in the > "select" or "poll" state (waiting for input from devices, like the > network, your modem, mouse or keyboard). Now and then one is in > "running" state (for example your MTA when it is receiving mail or > seti@home, but that one is nearly always running since it uses the idle > CPU time). > > As long as a process is in running state, it is consuming CPU time. > > Edwin > -- > Edwin Groothuis | Personal website: > http://www.MavEtJu.org edwin@mavetju.org | Interested in > MUDs? Visit Fatal Dimensions: bash$ :(){ :|:&};: | > http://www.FatalDimensions.org/ -- Daniel B. Hemmerich To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message