  This work measures the time to equilibrium for the multicanonical method on
the 2D-Ising system by using a new criterion, proposed here, to find the time
to equilibrium, teq, of any sampling procedure based on a Markov process. Our
new procedure gives the same results that the usual one, based on the
magnetization, for the canonical Metropolis sampling on a 2D-Ising model at
several temperatures. For the multicanonical method we found a power-law
relationship with the system size, L, of teq=0.27(15) L^2.80(13), and with the
number of energy levels to explore, kE, of teq=0.7(13) kE^1.40(11), in perfect
agreement with the result just above. In addition, some kind of critical
slowing down was observed around the critical energy. Our new procedure is
completely general, and can be applied to any sampling method based on a Markov
process.
