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Re: PSA: Clock drift and pkgin





On 2023-12-21 14:15, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote:
On Thu, 2023-12-21 13:58:21 +0100, Johnny Billquist <bqt%softjar.se@localhost> wrote:
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:
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.

Referring to https://kb.meinbergglobal.com/kb/time_sync/ntp/ntp_basics
("Checking ntpd's Time Adjustment Performance"), it lists:

delay	The mean packet delay, in milliseconds. This is the mean
	execution time required to send a read request to the time
	source, and receive the reply from that source.

offset	The mean time offset, in milliseconds.

jitter	The time jitter, in milliseconds. This indicates how much
	packet delays from individual pollings vary from the mean
	packet delay.

Well. I'm reading the RFCs:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1305
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5905


There is too much to just quote everything, but 5905, which is for NTPv4, says:

The jitter (psi) is defined as the root-mean-square (RMS) average of the most recent offset differences, and it represents the nominal error in estimating the offset.


And about offset, it says:

The offset (theta) represents the maximum-likelihood time offset of the server clock relative to the system clock.


So basically, offset is the difference between server clock and your local clock.

Now, network jitter can be a contributing factor, but it's not the definition, or the full part of what jitter is.

Of course, I could have been misunderstanding it all, but anyway...

But to tell for sure, we'd have to dive in into ntpd's code to prepare
`ntpq`'s `peers` data.

Sure. But the fact that you noted that the jitter was behaving in a way that did not match with your expectations, based on what your understanding of what jitter is might be suggesting that there is a mismatch here.

But in the end, the fact still remains that we have lousy time keeping on the VAX, and ntp is not able to cope with it. So let's try to fix this.

  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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