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From: chris@mimsy.UUCP (Chris Torek)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: CPU Accounting
Message-ID: <8991@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 13-Oct-87 05:25:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: mimsy.8991
Posted: Tue Oct 13 05:25:22 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Oct-87 06:55:15 EDT
References: <9737@brl-adm.ARPA>
Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 17
Summary: 4.2BSD-based systems make this almost useless

In article <9737@brl-adm.ARPA> 9531sons@WISCVM.WISC.EDU writes:
>Here, at UCSB, we charge UNIX users for CPU seconds....  Several
>years ago I modified the BSD 2.8 program "sa" to fit our local
>needs.  I installed the program on a SUN I have found that lots of
>SUN commands seem to be executing is less than a second!  ... on a
>neighboring VAX 11/780 (4.2 UNIX) ... the same thing seems to occur.

This is a bug in the 4.2BSD accounting code, faithfully copied into
early Sun releases.  Accounting is done only in terms of whole
seconds, which is nowhere near enough to record the execution of
`ls' or `cat'.

The situation is fixed in 4.3BSD, where accounting is done in units
of 1/AHZ (Accounting Hertz) seconds, rather than whole seconds.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7690)
Domain:	chris@mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris