4 ms·

Not really. If an NTP client gets 1/10th of the updates that it wants, it will still keep reasonably good time.

• nickysielicki 10y ago
  Keeping a table of clients and their last-updated time is probably more expensive than just sending them a response.
  • dom0 10y ago
    Randomly dropping a percentage of requests is stateless.
    • foepys 10y ago
      But what happens if you are the client whose requests are dropped all the time because you are unlucky?
      • tedunangst 10y ago
        Then I guess you'll have to use somebody else's free server.
    • zymhan 10y ago
      Is the NTP synchronization done with only a single packet? Because otherwise you'll be interrupting connections constantly.
      • gpderetta 10y ago
        It is UDP, so it is connectionless.
        • zymhan 10y ago
          UDP is a Transport Layer protocol. NTP is an Application Layer protocol.
          • gpderetta 10y ago
            Fair enough, UDP doesn't imply that the application protocol is connection-less, but AFAIK NTP is.
• detaro 10y ago
  Do NTP clients not retry immediately/very quickly if a request gets lost?
  • mitchty 10y ago
    Retry yes, immediately/very quickly no. Ntp is designed to handle network issues transparently.
    • foota 10y ago
      This was one of the issues wth netgears client, it retried every second until it worked.
      • mitchty 10y ago
        Incorrect clients aside, it should at worst be another 64 seconds (from memory so I might be wrong) before a client retries a poll.
  • vacri 10y ago
    It's more that your device's clocks don't skew that rapidly, unless something is really wrong.
    • detaro 10y ago
      But dropping requests to reduce traffic load is counter-productive if failed requests are quickly retried.