From owner-freebsd-current Sun Jan 2 15: 5:52 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from shell.webmaster.com (mail.webmaster.com [209.133.28.73]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8A86114BF3 for ; Sun, 2 Jan 2000 15:05:50 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from davids@webmaster.com) Received: from whenever ([209.133.29.2]) by shell.webmaster.com (Post.Office MTA v3.5.3 release 223 ID# 0-12345L500S10000V35) with SMTP id com; Sun, 2 Jan 2000 15:05:49 -0800 From: "David Schwartz" To: "Karl Denninger" , "Warner Losh" Cc: Subject: RE: xntpd - VERY old folks, how about updating? :-) Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 15:05:49 -0800 Message-ID: <000101bf5575$e8b342e0$021d85d1@youwant.to> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 8.5, Build 4.71.2377.0 In-reply-to: <20000102164519.A25992@Denninger.Net> Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6600 Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > Now explain to me how stability of your timing source ON THOSE MACHINES > is MATERIALLY different to any process WHICH THAT DEVICE MAY INTERACT WITH > between 10ns and 1us, AS SEEN FROM THE UNIX MACHINE. A battle you would win is if you said, "synchronizing the time of other UNIX machines without specialized hardware over a LAN or WAN". :) You can see 2 microsecond differences inside a single machine with no specialized hardware. You can see 5 microseconds over a good LAN. For example, youknow.youwant.to is synchronized to both tick.gpsclock.com and tock.gpsclock.com through a full-duplex 100Mbps LAN switch. Watch this: > ntpdate -q -p 8 209.133.29.16 209.133.29.20 server 209.133.29.16, stratum 1, offset -0.000298, delay 0.02579 server 209.133.29.20, stratum 1, offset -0.000302, delay 0.02579 2 Jan 15:01:01 ntpdate[2491]: adjust time server 209.133.29.20 offset -0.000302 sec Note that it claims that Tick and Tock agree with each other to 5 microseconds. But it has been unable to keep its own time to any better than 300 microseconds (it's been under heavy load, swapping in fact). In actual reality, the GPSClock 200 is better than the specifications indicate. If it really did alternate between 1us early pulses and 1us late pulses, stability would be measurably impacted. NTP is very good at smoothing things out anyway, especially since it only probes the clock every 64 seconds or so. David Schwartz http://www.gpsclock.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message