[ntp:questions] Use ntpd as a daemon so that it continuously disciplines clock, no

Miroslav Lichvar mlichvar at redhat.com
Mon Jan 17 15:45:18 UTC 2011


On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 02:46:28PM -0000, David J Taylor wrote:
> >Even when completely idle, ntpd wakes up every second and does quite a
> >lot (updating timers, scanning the peer hash table, etc). I'd say that
> >starting ntpd two times per day will take much less resources than
> >running it continuosly.
> 
> Have you ever measured the resources used by ntpd on a modern CPU?
> Absolutely negligible - at least when serving a dozen clients and
> serving as a stratum-1 PPS clock.  Perhaps a little more with
> thousands of clients, of course.  Not running ntpd continuously will
> ruin its accuracy.

For notebook users running ntpd only as an NTP client the extra wakeup
per second may make a measurable difference in battery life.

I was just pointing out it will take more resources than ntpd -q run
twice a day. Of course, the accuracy will be orders of magnitude
worse than continuosly running ntpd (even with poll 15 or 16).

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar



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