wall time

(Or "wall clock time") 1. "Real world" time (what the clock on

the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of

time.

2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the

number of ticks required to execute it (on a time-sharing

system these always differ, as no one program gets all the

ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support

one may get more processor time than real time).

[Jargon File]