5 ms·

I'm surprised there are no comments about the fact that these guys decided to run NTPD on a VM.

• cmrx64 10y ago
  I had the same thought. Does the world really need another (presumably) stratum-3 server running in Amazon's cluster, when Amazon already runs a pool of stratum-2 servers? ([0-3].amazon.pool.ntp.org).
  • simtel20 10y ago
    By my recent reading of the AWS docs, those pool addresses are not run by Amazon. They are DNS names that allow NTP load from AWS to the NTP pool to be distributed more fairly.
    • cmrx64 10y ago
      Ok, interesting.
    • X-Istence 10y ago
      It's a vendor zone, anyone can register for a vendor zone...
• late2part 10y ago
  t1.micro to boot - with more than the usual nondeterministic statmuxing and arbitrary "fairness" policy.
  • brian_cunnie 10y ago
    [author] Yeah, maybe that's why my AWS instance is the most jittery of my 4 timeservers (Google, Hetzner, Azure).
    • late2part 10y ago
      Your website says: Pivotal bridges the Silicon Valley state of mind, modern approach and infrastructure with your organization’s core expertise and values. Who we are and what we do together can reshape the world Your article suggests otherwise.
• kondor6c 10y ago
  You're not supposed to run an NTP server on a VM. The CPU cycles can be taken from the guest and perhaps used by the host or another guest. Other options that are available, is to drill a hole in the data center and run a GPS receiver to the roof and get the time from the GPS satellites. I think that is something many VPS/cloud providers will not allow. Edit: s/your/you're/
• brian_cunnie 10y ago
  [author] NTP runs fairly decently in a VM. Don't take my word for it — look at the graphs of my servers: Here's my Google VM, notice the jitter is within +/- 5 milliseconds: http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/104.155.144.4 http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/104.155.144.4 Here's my Hetzner VM (Germany). +/- 10 milliseconds, though I can't help but suspect the distance from the monitoring station (Los Angeles) may have more to do with it than being a VM: http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/78.46.204.247 http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/78.46.204.247 Here's my AWS VM. Much worse than Google in that it's +/- 50 milliseconds, but still good enough to pass muster with pool.ntp.org: http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.0.56.137 http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.0.56.137 Here's my Azure VM. It's in Singapore, and I re-deployed it last night, so the numbers are still coming in, but it has a pretty tight distribution: http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.187.42.158 http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.187.42.158
  • fxlv 10y ago
    Interesting stats. Thanks!
  • jlgaddis 10y ago
    Everyone's needs differ, I suppose, so some might consider that "decent". 10ms -- or even 50ms -- might be acceptable for many (most?) use cases but not for me. From a quick look, my own (stratum 2) server in the pool currently has an offset of just under 1/20th of one millisecond. Regardless, thanks for contributing to the pool!
  • bradfa 10y ago
    For another data point, here's my Digital Ocean droplet in Bangalore which sees from 10-60k queries per second depending on the time of day: http://www.pool.ntp.org/user/bradfa http://www.pool.ntp.org/user/bradfa