[ntp:questions] Re: How much load is caused by running "ntpq -p"?

Danny Mayer mayer at gis.net
Tue Oct 5 02:25:14 UTC 2004


brad at shub-internet.org wrote in message news:<20041001091751.359$gD at newsreader.com>...
> Folks,
> 
> Just kind of idly wondering here.  Does anyone know how much load is caused
> by running this command?  Could you overload a time server by running it
> too often?  Could you cause a time server to start to lose time by running
> it too often?
> 
> If this command does cause a heavy load on the time server, how often is
> "often enough" versus "too often"?
> 
> I'm seeing some strange things on one of my machines, and I'm trying to
> figure out if I'm causing my own problems by running this command too
> often, or if there might be something else going on.  Thanks!

That command generates mode 6 packets. The response is one packet per
peer of ascii text. So apart from looking up the stats for each peer
the only overhead is the I/O of sending n packets where
n = number of peers.

You shouldn't notice any of this. That doesn't mean that you should
rerun the query every few seconds of course.

Danny



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