Re: strange behaviour of ntp peerstats entries.

Root,

You could have saved a lot of time sweating the code if you looked at the briefings. See especially the before and after time series and note the 10 dB improvement in S/N.

You might not have noticed a couple of crucial issues in the clock filter code.

1. The basic principle is to select the samples that have not been delayed in queues, leaving hopefully the ones delayed only by propagation. It's better to discard the others that can only result in less accurate measurements.

2. The filter samples are correlated only if the total span of the filter is less than the Allan intercept, generally assumed in the order of 2000 s. For poll intervals above that, the samples become uncorrelated, so fewer samples are used.

3. Never use an old sample, only new onese. It often happens that the last used minimum delay sample is older than the most recent sample. The result is that the filter can toss out up to seven samples before finding a new candidate. The clock discipline loop is specifically designed to deal with that, which is one reason the time constant is larger than you might like.

Dave

root wrote:

OK, having looked at the code, I see what it is doing. It essentially takes the measurement with the shortest delay in the past 8 measurements.
If that measurement happens to be the current one, it is actually used in the clock loop. (Yes, I know this characterisation of the clock filter is cruder
than reality).


This makes the smaller variance of chrony even more impressive, since in my
tests, evey single measurement of offset was used to calculate the variance in the case of chrony, while
for ntp, only those "smallest" values as reported in peerstats were used. This also explains why the roundtrip variance in ntp was so much better than chrony's.

snip





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