Re: strange behaviour of ntp peerstats entries.

Danny,

True; there is an old RFC or IEN that reports the results with varying numbers of clock filter stages, from which the number eight was the best. Keep in mind these experiments were long ago and with, as I remember, ARPAnet sources. The choice might be different today, but probably would not result in great improvment in the general cases. Note however that the popcorn spike supressor is a very real Internet add-on.

The number of stages may have unforseen consequences. The filter can (and often does) introduce additional delay in the feedback loop. The loop time constant takes this into account so the impulse response is only marginaly affected. So, the loop is really engineered for good response with one accepted sample in eight. Audio buffs will recognize any additional aamples only improve the response, since they amount to oversampling the signal. Audio buffs will also recognize the need for zeal in avoiding undersampling, which is why the poll-adjust algorithm is so squirrely.

Dave

Danny Mayer wrote:

Unruh wrote:

mayer@xxxxxxxxxxx (Danny Mayer) writes:


Unruh wrote:

Brian Utterback <brian.utterback@xxxxxxx> writes:


Unruh wrote:

"David L. Mills" <mills@xxxxxxxx> writes:

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

I did notice them all. Thus my caveate. However throwing away 80% of the
precious data you have seems excessive.

Note that the situation can arise that the one can wait many more than 8
samples for another one. Say sample i is a good one. and remains the best
for the next 7 tries. Sample i+7 is slightly worse than sample i and thus
it is not picked as it comes in. But the next i samples are all worse than
it. Thus it remains the filtered one, but is never used because it was not
the best when it came in. This situation could keep going for a long time,
meaning that ntp suddenly has no data to do anything with for many many
poll intervals. Surely using sample i+7 is far better than not using any
data for that length of time.

On the contrary, it's better not to use the data at all if its suspect. ntpd is designed to continue to work well even in the event of loosing all access to external sources for extended periods.

And this could happen again. Now, since the
delays are presumably random variables, the chances of this happening are
not great ( although under a condition of gradually worsening network the
chances are not that small), but since one is running ntp for millions or
billions of samples, the chances of this happening sometime becomes large.


There are quite a few ntpd servers which are isolated and once an hour use ACTS to fetch good time samples. This is not rare at all.

And then promplty throw them away because they do not satify the minimum
condition? No, it is not "best" to throw away data no matter how suspect.
Data is a preecious comodity and should be thrown away only if you are damn
sure it cannot help you. For example lets say that the change in delay is
.1 of the variance of the clock. The max extra noise that delay can cause
is about .01 Yet NTP will chuck it. Now if the delay is 100 times the
variance, sure chuck it. It probably cannot help you. The delay is a random
process, non-gaussian admitedly, and its effect on the time is also a
random process-- usually much closer to gaussian. And why was the figure of
8 chosen ( the best of the last 8 tries) why not 10000? or 3? I suspect it
came off the top of someone's head-- lets not throuw away too much stuff,
since it would make ntp unseable, but lets throw away some to feel
virtuous. Sorry for being sarcastic, but I would really like to know what
the justification was for throwing so much data away.


No, 8 was chosen after a lot of experimentation to ensure the best results over a wide range of configurations. Dave has adjusted these numbers over the years and he's the person to ask.

Danny
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: strange behaviour of ntp peerstats entries.
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  • Re: strange behaviour of ntp peerstats entries.
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  • Re: strange behaviour of ntp peerstats entries.
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