Hi : I looked at the help for system.time but I still have the following
question. Can someone explain the output following output
of system.time :

 user          system      elapsed
12399.681  5632.352   56935.647

Here's my take based on the fact that I was doing ps -aux | grep R off and
on and the total amount of CPU minutes that
got allotted before the job ended was about 5 hours and the total actual
time that the job took was about 15 hours.

Does elapsed = total actual time job taken ? That seems to be the case or a
strange coincidence.

Does user + system = CPU time from ps -aux | grep R ? That seems to be the
case also or a weird coincidence.

Finally, why can't the CPU get a higher percentage ? It's seems like it's
always around 30% which would make sense since
5 is ~ 30% of 15 hours.

Also, assuming my take above is correct, when talking about timing of
algorithms, in this case, does one say the job took 5 hours or 15 hours ?
I'm trying to see how fast an algorithm is compared to others and I'm not
sure what the standard is.  I'm on fedora 16.0 and using R 2.15. Thanks.

	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]

