[ntp:questions] Enterprise NTP Architecture

Terje Mathisen terje.mathisen at hda.hydro.com
Tue Sep 30 14:25:31 UTC 2008


david.gouranton at gmail.com wrote:
> Thank you all for your answers. For FreeBSD, I know it would be cheap
> but :
> - we don't need a high time accuracy.

In which case any Linux server will do just fine.
> - we need to take into account the corporate environment (who manages
> the server ? what about the maintenance (soft and hard) ? who patches
> it ? etc)
> - we need to keep the network as homogeous as possible.

For my corporate network I set up a total of 6 servers, two in each of 
our three main locations.

I let every client machine (mostly unix and Win* servers but also some 
end-user boxes) connect to all six servers, since they can easily handle 
10-100 K client machines each.

Average load from 100K clients on a single server would be 100K 
request/reply packets every 64 seconds, or about 1500 request/second.

Since each packet is very short, this is on the order of 1 Mbit/s, i.e. 
any PC produced within the last 10-15 years can handle this without 
breaking a sweat.

The above was for worst-case loads, i.e. after a full reset of all 
clients at the same time. A more normal/average load is 1/8 of this, 
with each client sending a request every 512 seconds.

Terje
-- 
- <Terje.Mathisen at hda.hydro.com>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"




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