[time-nuts] Cloudflare

Achim Gratz Stromeko at nexgo.de
Mon Jun 24 20:35:11 UTC 2019


Tim Shoppa writes:
> I have been observing time.cloudflare.com latency and accuracy the past 3
> days.

>From my home network it is actually pretty bad compared to some other
servers.  It's likely the network and not the server, though.

> It is a stratum 3 server, so folks might think that it's not as good as a
> Stratum 1 or Stratum 2.
>
> BUT... it has exceptionally low latency and it seems very likely it's
> Stratum 3 because it is fed by a well-maintained set of highly redundant
> sources. The NTP stratum hierarchy is not a bad idea but really no end-user
> has any actual need to hook up to a real Stratum 1 and would almost always
> be better suited to choose a lower stratum server fed with a highly curated
> list of good Stratum 1/2's.

The thing is that you can't really know that, since getting permission
to use a particular NTP server by writing an email or even a snail mail
has been falling out of favor.  And even if you do know there's an awful
lot of stuff going on with the routing these days that neither you nor
the other end has any control over.

> It seems possible given cloudflare's diverse geographic servers, that folks
> will get directed to a nearby low-latency server every time they resolve
> the name.

That's the idea, yes.  I actually get a pretty short route (in number of
network hops), but latency should be about half what I'm getting
considering the geographical distance.  It's one particular
intermediate link that adds most of that latency.  Also there is extra
asymmetry on top of what my VDSL line produces normally.


Regards,
Achim.
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