Understanding the time command

[Gary Jarrel]

Hi All

I found that one of my systems runs a bit sluggish, and interestingly
enough it's the one with the fastest processor and most memory. My
feeling is that the problem is somewhere in HDD access (IO problem of
some sort) So before I spend countless hours on finding where the
problem is I though I'd do one quick test as follows:

time tar xvf file.tgz

file.tgz is 600Mb in size and my results:

System A (sluggish feeling)

real	0m13.268s
user	0m3.890s
sys	0m13.090s

System B

real	0m12.918s
user	0m3.300s
sys	0m0.990s

Now I am trying to understand why the huge difference in sys time but
not in the others.

Some specs of the systems: System A - Core i7, 12GB RAM. System B -
Core i5 8GB RAM!

The main difference is System B runs an Adaptec RAID Controller with 2
Seagate SATAII Enterprise drives while System A has a Samsung 750GB
SATAII drive connected to the SATA controller of an MSI Motherboard!

Any ideas would be welcome, as I really want to get this system up to
scratch since it's my development machine.

Cheers,

Gary