[ntp:questions] Client doesn't drop failed source
David Woolley
david at ex.djwhome.demon.invalid
Sun Jan 31 09:39:25 UTC 2010
Danny Mayer wrote:
>
> How many connections do you think it takes to overwelm a server? Even on
> an idle connection TCP normally requires at least a minute of timeout
If you enable keep alives, the default timeout is several hours. If you
don't enable keepalives, there is no idle traffic at all. You only need
keep alives if there is no natural traffic in one direction. Otherwise
the first packet towards the side that has forgotten the connection will
cause it to reset it.
> (lots of caveats, etc. here) but the server needs to drop these
> connections as quickly as possible in order to get the next one. Don't
> go there, there's a lot more going on under the hood than you seem to
> realise from this response.
TCP is actually designed to produce minimal idle traffic.
As noted elswhere, there are other reasons for not using TCP for NTP.
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