[ntp:questions] Use ntpd as a daemon so that it continuously disciplines clock, no
River Tarnell
r.tarnell at IEEE.ORG
Mon Jan 17 15:19:33 UTC 2011
In article <vs2dnZBjt4QHxanQnZ2dnUVZ_jydnZ2d at giganews.com>,
Richard B. Gilbert <rgilbert88 at comcast.net> wrote:
>On 1/17/2011 6:20 AM, Miroslav Lichvar 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.
>So running NTPD continuously eats 0.05% of the CPU! Do you *really* care?
3:13PM up 26 days, 7:36, 1 user, load averages: 0.06, 0.09, 0.04
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT STARTED TIME COMMAND
root 255 0.0 1.8 24620 18744 ? Ss 22Dec10 86:19.57 /usr/sbin/ntpd
ntpd has been running 26 days (37890 minutes) and has used 86 minutes of CPU;
i.e., 0.2% of a 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 CPU. This is on a pool.ntp.org server that
receives up to 100 queries/second. CPU use on a less busy system would likely
be a lot less.
I think it's fair to say that unless your CPU is *really* slow (embedded
system?), ntp's CPU use is not worth worrying about -- especially given the
advantages (more accurate time, even when the ntp server is unreachable).
- river.
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