3 ms·
Scuse me, I ran an NTP server on a net4501, which has a CPU so slow you can't even imagine it these days, and that left practically all of that CPU free for oth
by Arnt 7y ago
Scuse me, I ran an NTP server on a net4501, which has a CPU so slow you can't even imagine it these days, and that left practically all of that CPU free for other work.
NTP is demanding of the CPU and OS, but what it demands isn't a lot of seconds (or a lot of memory), it is being run at precisely the right time. The OS can't run the NTP server when there's nothing else to do, the NTP server needs the right nanoseconds in order to work well.
- jcrawfordor 7y agoThese being open internet time services though, and especially in the case of time.windows.com, we are talking about millions of clients. You can build a cluster to handle this, as Microsoft has, but it costs money. The issue is especially clear since, at least historically (I'm not sure about now), the popular time.nist.gov was not a cluster but a single machine. It was nearly impossible to carry out a successful NTP session with that machine due to its load, an especially large problem because some well-meaning vendors configured time.nist.gov as a default on embedded devices. The NIST requests that it not be used except as a source for stratum-2 NTP servers but few people would do that today considering the reliability problems.