wall time

(also 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 {tick}s required to execute it (on a timesharing 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).

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