Sorry for the confusing heading. The situation is this: I have a question that I cannot understand fully. I have a delay(x) function that does some meaningless yet complex stuff in its body (a loop that iterates x times) . In the main function, I take down the duration of running delay(x) via using gettimeofday(). With this program, I am supposed to answer this following question: The delay(x) function delays for a time approximately proportional to the value of x. Find out how long the delay(x) function takes for x. For example, if it takes y microseconds for each x (?) , then delay(z) should take about zy microseconds. What is the value of y? Am I suppose to find the value of the pre-emptive time given to each process as y? But I have results that are pretty small in the beginning. delay(1) gives me 5 uS while delay(2) gives me 6. That should be 10. So y is not the preemptive time. My question is: What is x,y,z? I cannot fully comprehend the question at all. I am running this program on Fedora 7. Compilation via gcc. The code is here: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> double delay(unsigned long loops) { unsigned long i; double z = i, y; z = i; for ( i = loops; i>=1;i-- ) { y = loops/(loops-i+1); z= (y*y+z) * i / loops; } return z; } int main(int argc, char* argv[] ) { struct timeval before, after; int i, n; if ( argc == 2 ) n = atoi(argv[1]); else exit(0); //capture the time gettimeofday(&before); delay(n); //capture the time again gettimeofday(&after); //get the time difference int duration = (after.seconds - before.seconds) *1000000 + ( after.useconds - before.useconds ); //print out the result blah! }

Sorry buddy,

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