[time-nuts] Re: Poor's man NTP

[Perry E. Metzger]

I'm going to say something that may seem heretical but probably 
shouldn't be...

On 12/16/21 18:37, giuseppe at marullo.it wrote:
> just wondering if a PI4 could be a suitable NTP server for a small lab (and
> maybe with some other NTP servers for my company, about 2000 clients).
>
> Main use is for correct timestamp on logs/computer time sync.

For log purposes, if you're down at the 2ms level you're probably 
utterly fine.

> Accuracy is *only* within 2ms after several hours (>24h). I was expecting
> under 1ms.

I'm sure many people here will tell you what you would need to get 
better performance, and there are certainly situations where such 
performance is necessary and important. I've worked on such applications 
myself, in which microsecond accuracy timestamping of network events was 
actually useful.

For ordinary system logs, you will never notice the difference if your 
clocks are off by a marginal 1ms. Your logs probably don't even record 
milliseconds, and if you're trying to debug a problem in your systems, 
your logging subsystem probably doesn't have good guarantees that it's 
going to timestamp events within a ms of them occurring. I'd consider 
your situation pretty good already and call it a day unless, as with 
many of us, you find the idea of getting your machines better 
synchronized for its own sake personally satisfying.

Note that there really isn't anything wrong with wanting to do better 
for its own sake, but from an engineering requirements point of view, 
you've already succeeded.

Perry