[ntp:questions] Quality vs. Quantity

Danny Mayer mayer at ntp.org
Sun Mar 23 04:07:01 UTC 2014


On 3/22/2014 8:54 PM, Daniel Quick wrote:
> While this should be obvious, I always have to ask how and why...
While considering that the number of requests to our time servers will
grow over time since the client decides which server to sync with.
> 
> Do we want a Netspeed setting that assists with taking the load off
some of the more heavily, higher-speed servers? or do we want to keep a
setting where we serve fewer clients with the highest resolution of time
given specific setup and let the client queries grow from there? I
suppose this also takes into the smart dns load-balancing that goes on
in the background.

What do you mean by load-balancing? NTP cannot be load-balanced. NTP
does a lookup and gets a specific address and continues to use it every
poll interval. If the server is unavailable then it doesn't matter since
it also queries other servers and decides based on a number of factors
which is likely to give the most accurate and precise timestamp at that
moment. That changes as traffic, network congestion, availability
changes and NTP will dynamically choose a different source for time. If
the DNS has a number of addresses associated with a fully qualified
domain name then NTP can take advantage of that and use all of them if
you use the pool configuration option.

Danny



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