wall time

n. (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).