Checking Application Performance

Checking Application Performance

If your system seems slow, for example, an application runs slowly, first check the application. Poorly designed applications can perpetuate poor system performance. Conversely, an efficiently written application means reduced code size and execution time.

A good utility to use to try to determine the source of the problem is the timex(1) utility. timex will report how a particular application is using its CPU processing time. The format is:

timex -s program

which shows program's real (actual elapsed time), user (time process took executing its own code), and sys (time of kernel services for system calls) time. For example:

timex -s ps -el

The above command executes the ps -el command and then displays that program's time spent as:

real 0.95

user 0.08

sys 0.41