Unix's time utility is a simple and often effective way of measuring how long a command takes to run ("wall time"). Unfortunately, running a command once can give misleading timings: the process may create a cache on its first execution, running faster subsequently; other processes may cause the command to be starved of CPU or IO time; etc. It is common to see people run time several times and take whichever values they feel most comfortable with. Inevitably, this causes problems.

multitime is, in essence, a simple extension to time which runs a command multiple times and prints the timing means, standard deviations, mins, medians, and maxes having done so. This can give a much better understanding of the command's performance.