"normal" clock drift

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Mar 1 21:01:42 UTC 2013


On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 3:48 PM, Tyler Aviss <tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> What do you see as a 'regular' clock drift on your hosts.
> (e.g. if you ran an ntp process at 30-min intervals, how far would you
> expect the drift on an average machine to be?)
>
> What would be considered abnormal?

My phone regularly drifts by ~1s; the ClockSync app often adjusts,
when it gets onto a
network, by around 1s.

I don't see any bumps in my logs at home lately; I would expect fairly
similar drift on
an undisciplined clock (e.g. - one not regularly getting touched by a
continuous NTP
daemon).  The crystals commonly on PC clocks aren't spectacularly precise, and
things have cheapened since the "real UNIX(tm) server days", where the vendors
*sometimes* paid attention to clock precision.

If you care about precise time, you really should install ntpd, and have it
continuously discipline your clock, as you can surely, on modern
hardware, afford
the ~1MB of RSS consumed by ntpd.
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