[ntp:questions] Server offset included in served time?

David Woolley david at ex.djwhome.demon.co.uk.invalid
Tue Sep 16 22:04:33 UTC 2008


Unruh wrote:
> David Woolley <david at ex.djwhome.demon.co.uk.invalid> writes:
> 
>> But, if you use individual measurements, you will get a figure that, 
>> most of the time, is several times the true error and not necessarily in 
>> the right direction.
> 
> No idea what that sentence means. Are you refering to the gps readings
> which will be at worst 2 orders of magnitude better than that offsets from
> a generic network? 

I'm assuming a time discipline algorithm that is properly matched to the 
system time noise.  I tend to agree that NTP probably isn't, but in that 
case one should be changing the algorithm to make it properly matched, 
rather than trying to record how bad it is.

With such an algorithm, one would expect the measured offsets to be more 
or less equally positive and negative and distributed fairly randomly. 
That is the mathematical assumption that I believe is the basis of the 
theoretical analysis of the behaviour of NTP.  The various filters in 
NTP will low pass filter this noise and considerably reduce it in 
amplitude, resulting in the value in the system clock.  As a result, the 
jitter in the system clock should be a lot less than the measurement 
jitter, and at any one instant may be result in a deviation in the same 
direction as the offset reducing the resulting offset.

NTP also assumes that there will be a wander component, and tries to 
increase the polling interval until the wander component begins to dominate.

Your position, and I tend to agree with it, is that there is a variation 
that there is another noise component, which results in occasional fast 
transients.  But as I said, the correct approach to that is not to graph 
the resulting failure, but to improve the algorithms to give the best 
estimate of the time under those circumstances, which is, I believe, 
what you think chrony does.  My guess is that chrony also produces 
offsets with a standard deviation that is significantly greater than the 
typical system clock error.

> 
>> What you can do, is to use some hindsight, and make a slightly better 
>> estimate of the true time by combining offsets from both before and 
>> after the time the local clock was read.  That gives you an advantage 
> 
> Unfortunately those offsets are not very useful, because the clock that
> read them has had its offsets and rates changed (by ntp) since then. Ie the
> measured offsets are not a good estimate of the offsets from "true time".

Ideally, those adjustments are compensating for parameter changes in the 
local clock and making it keep closer to true time.  With chrony, the 
correction history is also largely measuring things like temperature, 
rather than true changes in the clock rate.

> 
> 
>> during startup and after transients, but, in the steady state, the local 
>> clock time is going to be the same as such an enhanced statistic.
> 
>> In the steady state, all you can really deduce from the offsets is the 
>> amount of noise in the measurements.  You can then expect the amount of 
>> noise in the local clock time to be several times less.
> 
> No, the noise in the local clock may well dominate those offsets. This is
> what happens for example to a system which is controlled by a hardware

In that case, you have a system that is not matched to the noise 
characteristics and you need to improve the algorithms.  Again, to the 
extent that you can reliably measure the error from true time, you 
should be correcting the local clock by that amount, not measuring it 
for posterity.

My basic point in this whole thread is that if you can measure the true 
error, in real time, you can correct it in real time, resulting in an 
error that is statistically zero, based on historic measurements.




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