[ntp:questions] NTP Third party client on Windows OS ?

Brian Garrett mgy1912 at cox.net
Mon Sep 24 17:27:58 UTC 2007


"Dennis Hilberg, Jr." <timekeeper at dennishilberg.com.invalid> wrote in 
message news:bpWdnXlk54h2U2vbnZ2dnUVZ_g6dnZ2d at comcast.com...
> Evandro Menezes wrote:
>> On Sep 23, 1:37 pm, Evandro Menezes <evan... at mailinator.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Here's what I 
>>> mean:http://img250.imageshack.us/img250/8264/peerstatsde3.png
>>> (the flat line is for the time that the system was shutdown).
>>
>> And, for completeness sake: 
>> http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/7841/loopstatsfh7.png.
>>
>
> If it's any help, my Windows XP machine also performs poorly with 
> timekeeping.  The frequency varies quite a bit and almost seems random, 
> and as a result the offset suffers.
>
> Even with default settings the poll interval on its peer rarely exceeds 
> 256, but spends most of its time at 64.  One time I set minpoll 4 in the 
> options, to see if a lower poll would help it perform better.  It ended up 
> spending most of its time at poll 16, but the performance was a lot 
> better.  I keep it at minpoll 4 maxpoll 4 now, with good results compared 
> to what it was.
>
> I run the Meinberg NTP distribution, but am considering going back to the 
> Automachron SNTP software ( http://www.oneguycoding.com/automachron/ ) 
> that I used for years.  It's easy to configure and it works well for the 
> Windows machines.
>
I use Meinberg on Windows XP too, and while I usually do get good results, 
with the poll interval gradaully going up to 1024, that isn't always the 
case.

> It's possible that Windows just isn't sophisticated enough for a precise 
> timekeeping implementation like NTP.  Although its performance might be 
> better in a server environment rather than a workstation environment.

Definitely.  Resource-intensive applications inevitably bring the poll 
interval back down to 64 and keep it there.  It also seems that if the 
frequency is too unstable, NTP (or Meinberg's NTP, at any rate) will give up 
on trying to update the drift file.  My clock was running hundreds of 
milliseconds fast with NTP happily running the poll interval at 512.  I 
stopped the service, deleted the driftfile and restarted NTP.  Everything 
once again functioned as it should.


Brian Garrett
>
> -- 
> Dennis Hilberg, Jr.      timekeeper(at)dennishilberg(dot)com
> NTP Server Information:  http://saturn.dennishilberg.com/ntp.php 





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