Measuring resource usage

[FourthWorld]

CGI is an uncommonly harsh environment, with the entire runtime life cycle happening in the time it takes to satisfy an HTTP request. So I tend to take great care in measuring both CPU time and memory with CGI scripts, but I've found it difficult to get accurate measurements in the server environment.

One commonly-recommended method is to use the "time" program, with the --verbose option to include memory

Code: Select all

/usr/bin/time --verbose ./livecode-server somescriptfile.lc

It seems on many systems that time program is implemented in an incomplete way, showing artificially low values for memory usage.

top might seem a good option, but in practice it's useless since even its tightest update frequency is less than the execution time of my scripts.

Any suggestions for something like /usr/bin/time but is actually reliable, something I can attach to the command line call for an accurate measurement of both time and memory?