"Ron Frazier (NTP)" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
I'm forking the subject line, which didn't really seem relevant any
more.
more below
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http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Win-8+Internet.html
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From my point of view, those look pretty good. Those peerstats graphs
come in pretty handy.
It is an unloaded system, but may show what NTP can do at best using just
Internet servers in a domestic Internet-linked environment.
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What's the dangerous part? Are we just talking lots of CPU churning?
If so, can I just shut down NTP and tweak it?
Sincerely,
Ron
Ron,
It's just about performance. Windows XP performed better when NTP tried
to interpolate the ~15 millisecond timer ticks. Windows Vista performed
significantly worse when that interpolation scheme was used, so it was
conditionally disabled. In early tests of Windows-7, performance seemed
better, but the OS code which changed the timer interval didn't start at
the same time as NTP, so sometimes NTP made the wrong choice.
Here's what Dave Hart said at that time:
"I thought I understood the problem with ntpd interpolation on
Vista/Win7 to be caused by the OS scheduling granularity being
insufficiently finer than the native clock granularity, so that the
interpolation thread's sampling of counter/native clock correlations was
nearly always occurring at the same relative point between two native
clock ticks, rather than being nicely spread around. Being spread around
is important because the algorithm chooses the sample nearest the prior
native clock tick when converting a counter value to an interpolated
time."
So there's no problem with high CPU or anything like that - simply worse
offset and jitter. You can also force interpolation off by setting:
NTPD_USE_SYSTEM_CLOCK=1
or on with:
NTPD_USE_INTERP_DANGEROUS=1
Delete the environment variables not in use. The actual value they are
set to doesn't matter, it's only the presence or absence which is tested.
After setting these SYSTEM environment variables, simply restart the NTP
service to see the change. I see these settings as ones for
experimenters, and they should not be needed in normal use.
Cheers,
David
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