5

In a program that calls getrusage() twice in order to obtain the time of a task by subtraction, I have once seen an assertion, saying that the time of the task should be nonnegative, fail. This, of course, cannot easily be reproduced, although I could write a specialized program that might reproduce it more easily.

I have tried to find a guarantee that getrusage() increased along execution, but neither the man page on my system(Linux on x86-64) nor this system-independant description say so explicitly.

The behavior was observed on a physical computer, with several cores, and NTP running.

Should I report a bug against the OS I am using? Am I asking too much when I expect getrusage() to increase with time?

Pascal Cuoq
  • 79,187
  • 7
  • 161
  • 281

1 Answers1

4

On many systems rusage (I presume you mean ru_utime and ru_stime) is not calculated accurately, it's just sampled once per clock tick which is usually as slow as 100Hz and sometimes even slower.

Primary reason for that is that many machines have clocks that are incredibly expensive to read and you don't want to do this accounting (you'd have to read the clock twice for every system call). You could easily end up spending more time reading clocks than doing anything else in programs that do many system calls.

The counters should never go backwards though. I've seen that many years ago where the total running time of the process was tracked on context switches (which was relatively cheap and getrusge could calculate utime by using samples for stime, and subtracting that from the total running time). The clock used in that case was the wall clock instead of a monotonic clock and when you changed the time on the machine, the running time of processes could go back. But that was of course a bug.

Art
  • 19,807
  • 1
  • 34
  • 60
  • Actually, the assertion that failed was concerned about the sum of `ru_utime` and `ru_stime`, so it seems that for a very short task duration, at least one went backwards, but I don't know which. – Pascal Cuoq Nov 07 '14 at 13:43
  • If you want the sum of those times, look at the documentation of your system and see if you have a better option in `clock_gettime`. Since you tagged it with linux, you should have `CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID` which will provide better resolution and accuracy than `getrusage` because as far as I know it is accounted on context switches and when you read it. Of course, that doesn't answer the question, but might be a better option. – Art Nov 07 '14 at 14:12