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Re: PSA: Clock drift and pkgin



On 2023-12-21 13:53, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
On Thu, 2023-12-21 12:49:06 +0100, Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
On 2023-12-21 12:14, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
On Thu, 2023-12-21 10:44:22 +0000, Maciej W. Rozycki <macro%orcam.me.uk@localhost> wrote:
On Wed, 20 Dec 2023, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:

[...]

Looking at the numbers, I wonder about multiple issues here. Why did
the jitter values rise up that much, while the delay keeps its value?

Unless I remember wrong, delay is merely how long it takes for packets to
travel back and forth to the ntp server. So it has no relation to jitter or
offset. It would rather be weird if delay suddenly started changing.

delay is ... "ping time".  jitter is a measure of how much ping times
differ to each other.

Right for delay. But no for jitter. Jitter is, unless I remember wrong, comparison between your local clock and the server clock, and how much they are shifting around compared to each other. It has nothing to do with ping times.

And jitter have to get low for ntp to start syncing, since it's not possible to do any kind of syncing if local time is moving around too much compared to server time. It becomes impossible to tell how local time should be modified in such a case.

It is kind of unreasonable that the jitter changes so much while delay
seems to be always in the same region.

I would disagree.

ntp starts out with an interval of 64s, and backs off to 1024 eventuall,
over time, if things are stable. In this case things aren't stable, but it
seems to never have locked on to anything. So it's just been drifting the
whole time, it looks to me.

That's why I was interested in how the pll freq changed. The 1024sec
poll interval however is an indicator for a successful lock.

No. It's an indication that ntp just don't see a need for more frequent polling. Which could either be because you have a lock, and all is stable, or you don't have a lock, and you are not going to achieve one based on information available. Primarily constantly way too high jitter. But I could be confused. It's a very long time since I was reading up on ntp, and most I can recall now are based on observations how ntp have been behaving on multiple systems over many years.

  Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol


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