running time of a software
 

Hi all,
Can someone explain what is the difference between measure running time of a software by:
kernel , user , real

I want to compare 5 softwares in their running time.

My problem is that i am sharing server with many users, and many softwares are executed in the same server.So the time is always changing even when i am using the same software.
Is there any solution for this, or do i have to wait when no-other procs on the server?

Thanks,
Pap

See...

Those two man pages should be a sufficient description for you. Real time is elapsed time and the actual computation time is the sum of both system and user time. You should also note that the time command is a shell builtin for bash so if you want to use a better time command use /usr/bin/time specified with the full path.

SAM