[ntp:questions] NTP vs RADclock?

Joseph Gwinn joegwinn at comcast.net
Sun Jun 3 19:53:49 UTC 2012


In article <jqgakc$420$1 at dont-email.me>,
 David Woolley <david at ex.djwhome.demon.invalid> wrote:

> skillzero at gmail.com wrote:
> > Has there been any independent comparison of NTP vs RADclock [1]?
> > Information on the RADclock site seem to indicate it performs pretty
> > well, but I haven't seen any analysis except from the RADclock
> > authors.
> 
> This is the first I've heard of it, so I assume that it has never 
> appeared on this newsgroup, and its authors are not active here.
> 
> What really annoys me, though, is that it fails to describe the essence 
> of the algorithm on the first page. That's par for the course for 
> commercial software, but this says that it is open source.  Can you 
> point me to where this information is provided (I think ntpd has a 
> similar problem, though).
> 
> > 
> > I'm using NTP today for synchronization between devices on a LAN to
> > each other of an internal clock separate from the system's normal wall
> > clock (which uses the system's NTP). So I have flexibility with update
> > intervals (1-3 seconds acceptable in my case) and other parameters.
> > 
> > [1] <http://www.synclab.org/radclock/>

I looked at one of their demonstrations, TIM_2008_camera.pdg, where they 
showed 10 microsecond sync over a LAN, with very bad NTP performance.  
But I've done 7 microsconds with NTP in a quiet testbed on 1996-era 
hardware, so I don't know what the problem with NTP was.  I'll have to 
read the paper more carefully.

Joe Gwinn



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