Re: GNU time: incorrect results

[Bob Proulx]

Sven Hartrumpf wrote:
> For example on a openSUSE 11.3 box (64bit), I get incorrect RSS
> results (4 times too large, compared to top/htop).

GNU time is a simple program and for the most part simply reports
information provided by the kernel about the child process.  It is
hard to believe that it is showing incorrect information.  But
OpenSuSE may have patches which modify or extend the functionality and
so it might be somewhat different from the upstream GNU version.

Can you reproduce the problem?  Can you run time under strace to show
what values were returned from the system call?

  $ strace -v -o time.strace.out /usr/bin/time -v SOMEPROGRAM

That should print to the time.strace.out file the values of the rusage
structure returned from the wait4(2) system call.  That is the
information that GNU time prints out.  That information is direct from
the Linux kernel.  But hopefully the strace will show something
interesting.

Thanks,
Bob