How often are these boxes restarted? NTP seems to take a 8 hours or more to really "settle". If you're rebooting the Windows machines frequently (and you *should* be at least once per month to get MS security patches), NTP will always perform worse in comparison with a Linux box that is always on.
If your hardware has any power-management features enabled (Intel SpeedStep, AMD CoolNQuiet, etc.), that would do it. Others may have mentioned disabling ACPI in the BIOS, but you will also want to checkDevice Manager to make sure you don't have speed-throttling "CPU drivers" or other "system devices" installed or activated. Finally, the WinXP firewall or other software firewall could be adding small delays if it is enabled and CPU utilization isn't genreally low. So could any host-based intrustion prevention, anti-spyware, or antivirus software that scans live network connectios for threats (e.g.Symantec Client Security). Also make sure the multimedia timers are enabled during setup of NTPd. For reference, right now my XP box is showing an offset of 22ms when syncing with internet stratum-2 servers, although it has only been running for about 6 hours (I hate to think what a P4 running 24/7 would look like on my electric bill). Our Windows 2003 servers running ntpd at the office typically maintain +/-1 ms offsets when syncing to nearby stratum-1 servers after running for a few hours. _______________________________________________ questions mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ntp.isc.org/mailman/listinfo/questions
