On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 01:32:14AM -0800, Ask Bjjjrn Hansen wrote: > Sadly it seems like a HUGE amount of users are fetching time right at > the top of the hour. > > http://tmp.askask.com/2009/03/84.45.68.23-daily.png
RRDtool isn't really very good for this sort of thing; you really want to do some sort of time series analysis to get useful information out. That'd allow you to correct for things like the gentle upward drift over time as the service accumulates users, the intra-annual changes as people go on holiday and hence computers are on for more or less time, weekly and daily effects and so on. I've not been logging this data for a while now, but remember the hourly spikes being big. Also there were very reliable other effects, 14minutes past for some reason sticks out in my memory. Some people like to query at specific seconds past the hour as well, which was slightly strange but would suggest that they are maintaining their clock reasonably well. I seem to have chucked all my data away, but I'll get my logging going and see if I can put something like this together again. I think I found the best was to dump out the binary stream of the incoming NTP "response" packets. I can't remember how I identified them as being response packets now, but it shouldn't be too hard. > It's almost tempting to tweak the nameserver so the TTL in the minute > just around the top of the hour is 3-4 hours instead of the usual 20 > minutes. Sounds like an interesting experiment! If you've got a host that could take a bit of load, you could try redirecting some subset of the traffic towards it at specific times and build up a more complete profile of the traffic over time. -- Sam http://samason.me.uk/ _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
