i7 benchmark (kernel compile time), help?

[a7ilcy]

Hello folks, I wanted to test my new i7 build and compiled the 2.6.32.8 kernel to check the results. Using the time command to benchmark, I got these results:

real 21m29.909s
user 47m55.350s
sys 6m11.100s

Initially I sat & watched the process thinking it will probably be completed in 5-10 minutes. But anyway, went off for some coffee & snacks to return and see it still compiling.

n00b query: what are these times ? Does the real time mean the total time taken since I sat watching the screen, went for snacks, and came back ? I mean I definitely didn't spend 47 minutes on the coffee! In short, is that the metric I need to optimize ?

The test configuration:
Core i7 920 OCed to 3 Ghz | Corsair 1333 MHz 6G RAM | WD Blue 500G HDD

Also, I checked the system monitor in between and the memory usage was only around 600M. ugh, why couldn't make use more memory and make things faster ?!

[towo2099]

How many make-jobs you have used?
On an i7 you should compile with -j8.

[curaga]

man time:

These statis-
tics consist of (i) the elapsed real time between invocation and termi-
nation, (ii) the user CPU time (the sum of the tms_utime and tms_cutime
values in a struct tms as returned by times(2)), and (iii) the system
CPU time (the sum of the tms_stime and tms_cstime values in a struct
tms as returned by times(2)).

In short, real is the wall clock time elapsed.

[a7ilcy]

Thanks for the replies.

Yes, I did set CONCURRENCY_LEVEL=8 when executing make. Is it different from -j 8 option ?

Also, after further stripping the kernel, I did get a 5 minutes real time.