From: Alex Young Date: 2007-02-10T07:42:45+09:00 Subject: The meaning of Benchmark's times Hi all, I thought I understood what user and system times meant. Then I saw this from Benchmark, while comparing response times of a WEBrick server and a Mongrel server: user system total real webrick 29.580000 4.920000 34.500000 ( 87.191739) mongrel 27.640000 4.540000 32.180000 ( 58.508197) Clearly the mongrel server wins, but why does it only show in the wallclock measurement? Where did the rest of the time go? This is repeatable, so I don't think it's interference from any other processes on the machine. To be clear here, what I'm actually measuring is the time taken for 10000 queries to be serviced from a separate process, and the webrick and mongrel servers are also each in their own process. Everything's on localhost. Any ideas? -- Alex