In a recent post I mentioned using a scratchpad to record everything I do. As part of that process I try to make regular use of the UNIX/Linux “time” command to record elapsed times of long running commands.
It’s really simple to use. All you do is put “time” in front of the command and it will display how long it takes to complete the command. In this example I do a sleep for 10 seconds and use the time command to report the elapsed time. 🙂
$ time sleep 10 real 0m10.002s user 0m0.001s sys 0m0.001s $
Clearly that’s a silly example, but it gives you an idea of how this works.
If you get into the habit of using this with all long running processes, you can get accurate timings for steps. That way, when someone asks you how long something takes you can give them a real answer, rather than making something up and hoping for the best.
Just remember, timings can vary if the load on the system varies between runs. Even so it’s always nicer to have some real data to inform your decisions going forward. Especially when planning for something that will cause disruption in production. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Also, with time you will have a record of how installation (or whatever the script is intended to do) times have improved with newer Oracle versions.
The other handy way of timing, if you have a lot of commands in bash script and you want a total at the end.
#!/bin/bash
SECONDS=0
#do stuff you want to time
duration=$SECONDS
eval “echo Elapsed Time $(date -ud “@$duration” +’$((%s/3600/24)) days %H hours %M minutes %S seconds’)”