I'm running chrony 4.3 on a router/gateway device that acts both as an NTP client as well as LAN NTP server.
In somewhere between 33%-50% of all cases, directly after starting chrony, its root dispersion steadily rises by a second per second until the first polling interval has elapsed, after which it returns to normal (~0.03s) values. The relevant part of my chrony.conf could look like this: server 5.196.160.139 minpoll 10 iburst server 194.95.183.223 minpoll 10 iburst makestep 1000 10 I've taken two random addresses from from 2.europe.pool.ntp.org for this example, but the issue is visible with all public NTP servers I've tested. For example, after about 7 minutes after starting, the outputs of tracking, sources and sourcestats are: Reference ID : 05C4A08B (ip139.ip-5-196-160.eu) Stratum : 3 Ref time (UTC) : Tue Jan 24 13:33:24 2023 System time : 0.000000000 seconds slow of NTP time Last offset : +0.000006036 seconds RMS offset : 0.000006036 seconds Frequency : 0.000 ppm slow Residual freq : +7.203 ppm Skew : 1000000.000 ppm Root delay : 0.038680598 seconds Root dispersion : 428.669036865 seconds Update interval : 2.1 seconds Leap status : Normal MS Name/IP address Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample =========================================================================== ^* ip139.ip-5-196-160.eu 2 10 17 433 -9908ns[-3872ns] +/- 20ms ^+ afsdb1-dmz.cbs.mpg.de 2 10 17 433 -175us[ -169us] +/- 38ms Name/IP Address NP NR Span Frequency Freq Skew Offset Std Dev ========================================================================== ip139.ip-5-196-160.eu 4 4 6 +4.787 1694.587 +2208us 262us afsdb1-dmz.cbs.mpg.de 4 3 6 +8.709 1337.888 +3593us 230us Note the root dispersion of more than 400 seconds. As a result, some clients discard NTP responses from this chrony instance for almost 20 minutes. Network operations employing our devices have stated they strongly prefer minimizing NTP traffic and server load, so lowering minpoll is not a viable option, unfortunately. Is this behaviour intentional? If so, is there a configuration option I could set in chrony.conf to work around the issue? Kind regards, Tim Barnewski AVM GmbH -- To unsubscribe email chrony-users-requ...@chrony.tuxfamily.org with "unsubscribe" in the subject. For help email chrony-users-requ...@chrony.tuxfamily.org with "help" in the subject. Trouble? Email listmas...@chrony.tuxfamily.org.