Monitoring memory and disk I/O using gtime on Linux

[Ken Meacham]

Hi,

I've installed version 1.7 of GNU time on a machine running SuSE Linux 7.1

When I run this in verbose mode, it seems that many of the parameters come
out as zeros, e.g:

        Command being timed: "femlib_0_2 -m hex_ne_1000_ff_50 -o results"
        User time (seconds): 19.46
        System time (seconds): 0.37
        Percent of CPU this job got: 91%
        Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:21.72
        Average shared text size (kbytes): 0
        Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0
        Average stack size (kbytes): 0
        Average total size (kbytes): 0
        Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 0
        Average resident set size (kbytes): 0
        Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 265
        Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 19550
        Voluntary context switches: 0
        Involuntary context switches: 0
        Swaps: 0
        File system inputs: 0
        File system outputs: 0
        Socket messages sent: 0
        Socket messages received: 0
        Signals delivered: 0
        Page size (bytes): 4096
        Exit status: 0

I'm particularly interested in extracting accumulated statistics for an
individual execution of an application, such as:
total user time
total sys time
total I/O time
elapsed time
maximum memory usage
average memory usage
number of bytes read from disk
number of bytes written to disk

Can you explain why these parameters come out as zeros? Is it just that the
O/S doesn't record this information? Is this problem fixable, or do you know
of any other ways of extracting this information from the system?

Many thanks,

Ken Meacham
IT Innovation Centre
2 Venture Road
Chilworth Science Park
Southampton, SO16 7NP, UK

tel: +44 23 8076 0834
fax: +44 23 8076 0833

mailto:address@hidden
http://www.it-innovation.soton.ac.uk/