Let me use an example to help explain what your results above show:
First: I created a bash script that I ran as the user patrickr which was meant to put enough load on the system to be noticeable.
#!/bin/bash
#this file is named loop_script.sh
for i in {1..5000}
do
echo "Welcome $i times"
done
Second: I uninstalled and then reinstalled acct so that my files in /var/log/acct would be fresh. Create a copy of the /var/log/acct/pacct file so that in the future you can easily truncate the file with a properly formatted file (you can't just delete and recreate the file - sa will stop working if you do that). Note that this file is a log of all commands on the system and as far as I can tell there is no way to pull parts on the log based on time periods.
Third: I then ran this script twice as patrickr
patrickr@hostname:~$ bash loop_script.sh
I'll give you the results and then I'll explain them:
Ran as root (or any user other that patrickr)
After first loop as patrickr:
**sa -m**
24 0.09re 0.03cp 0avio 894k
root 22 0.07re 0.02cp 0avio 853k
patrickr 2 0.02re 0.01cp 0avio 1336k
**sa -u |grep patrickr**
patrickr 0.38 cpu 1336k mem 0 io bash
After second loop as patrickr:
**sa -m**
30 0.09re 0.03cp 0avio 850k
root 27 0.07re 0.02cp 0avio 814k
patrickr 3 0.02re 0.01cp 0avio 1178k
**sa -u |grep patrickr**
patrickr 0.38 cpu 1336k mem 0 io bash
patrickr 0.35 cpu 1336k mem 0 io bash
patrickr 0.00 cpu 863k mem 0 io ls (I happened to also run ls at patrickr)
**sa -u**
The results returned 106 results for a total of 2.86cpu that averaged to 0.03cp
Here's what you're seeing:
sa -m is showing averages for the all the activity for this server overtime. This file grows larger over time as more commands run.
sa -u | grep patrickr is showing the sum of the system and user time in cpu minutes for specific commands.
Running:
sa -u |grep patrickr|awk 'BEGIN{TOTAL=0}{TOTAL=TOTAL+$2}END{print TOTAL}'
Will give you a combined total for user patrick but the sa -m command is actually giving you averages. Take a look at the memory values is you need a second example. They're averaged too.
If I add the three results listed above for patrickr, .35 + .37 + .0 and divide by 106 and round to the to the nearest hundredth I'll get 0.01cp.
The result of 0.01cp is the average load of user patrickr on the system in comparison to all load on the system from the time that the acct application was installed (ie since the file /var/log/acct/pacct started keeping track).
Output Fields
cpu - sum of system and user time in cpu minutes
re - actual time in minutes
k - cpu-time averaged core usage, in 1k units
k*sec - cpu storage integral (kilo-core seconds)
u - user cpu time in cpu minutes
s - system time in cpu minutes
A good resource that will help you is at beginlinux.com (original link found here).
