Ok, about half of the Windows servers have 0.5 millisecond offsets and
some have 3 millisecond offsets. I still call that "millisecond
level". That is very different from "microsecond level". To me the
terms "milli level", "nano level" and so on mean "round to the nearest
three orders of magnitude." It is a VERY course level of rounding
even more so than"rough order of magnitude" type rounding. So I
think "micro second level" means not "within one uSec but "you are
using uSec as your units when you tell people the number"
For most casual users even 100mS is better than they need. No one
notices if you are 100mS late for a meeting.
Chris Albertson
Redondo Beach, California
Thanks, Chris.
http://www.satsignal.eu/mrtg/performance_ntp.php
The graphs may be confusing at first glance. To overcome the limitation
of MRTG of only plotting positive numbers, I needed to add a fixed amount
to the reported offset so that it becomes a positive value. I chose the
offset and scaling values so that a server keeping perfect time would be a
line right down the centre of the graph. The offset reported by NTP is
the deviation from that centre-line. The left axis annotation states this
offset.
FreeBSD PC Pixie shows deviations around 10 microseconds from nominal,
mostly caused by the heating switching on.
Windows XP PC Feenix shows maximum deviations of around 200 microseconds.
Windows-7/32 PC Stamsund shows maximum deviations which are likely under
50 microseconds.
The scale on the graphs for PCs Alta and Bacchus does not allow the
deviations to be estimated accurately (as they were not originally
intended as stratum-1 servers), but the deviation may well be under 0.3
ms.
A couple of these PCs have speaking clocks (software) running, and
multiple speakers speaking at differing times is rather distracting. They
are also monitoring a satellite data broadcast, where event times are
compared across PCs, and across Europe, and having logs time stamped
reasonably accurately can help. Other folk are using PCs to measure the
propagation delay of radio signals where, I understand, millisecond
accuracy is the level talked about.
Colloquially, I might say: FreeBSD tens of microseconds, Windows hundreds
of microseconds or perhaps Windows tenths of milliseconds.
Cheers,
David
--
SatSignal software - quality software written to your requirements
Web: http://www.satsignal.eu
Email: [email protected]
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