I'm really surprised by the servers being within 500ms of each other, to be 
honest.  

I've got a timesheet product on GAE and I've had clock skew of more than a 
minute between some instances, although it's fairly rare that it's anywhere 
near that large and it's a lot better now than it ever has been. 

Cheers,
Simon

On Saturday, 30 June 2012 01:04:47 UTC+1, Cesium wrote:
>
> Hey Jeff,
>
> Think of, for example, a global network of sensors measuring geo-physical 
> phenomena.
> They need to be synchronized. The maximum uncertainly is determined by the 
> phenomenon being measured.
>
> It all boiled down to needing a time server on port 80 whose difference 
> from UTC was less than
> about 500ms.
>
> I really didn't want to use the usual port 13 servers. So I wrote a GAE 
> time server.
>
> Three years have past since I last looked at this 
> issue.<https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/google-appengine/wNFhGaIUlXQ>
>
> All the data I have collected show that GAE's server's are well within 
> 500ms of UTC(NIST).
> Even without 'guarantees.' That's good enough for me.
>
> But today I learn that App Engine has a cool, clever workaround that 
> slowly slews it 1 second off UTC(NIST).
>
> It's not the length of the individual seconds (frequency) that counts. 
> It's the integral of all these seconds (phase) that matters.
> That integral in this case will be an error of 1 second. Next time the ERS 
> demands a leap second, the error will be 2 seconds.
> This leads to a time stamp that no longer accurately reflects statements 
> like: "Number of seconds since 1 Jan 1970 00:00:00 UTC."
>
> I'm just heart-broken to hear that Google decided to brush these leap 
> seconds under the rug by changing the rate of their time-scale.
> They are real points on the UTC time-scale, and important things happen on 
> our planet during these leap seconds.
>
> The punchline is that I did some poking around and found a buddy that 
> serves UTC(NIST) on port 80.
>
> Sweet!
>
> David
>
>

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