ntpMerlin Too many pools for Chronyd to swim?

[JT Strickland]

My chronyd performance don't seem quite as good with AX routers than it was with AC, with respect to the offset and drift. Can one specify too many pools for chrony to pool from, bogging it down? Is it better to specify a couple of servers instead of pools?
Other than that, it's been smooooth sailing.
thanks,
jts

 

[Wade Coxon]

Drift is at the mercy of the hardware and the stability of the device's clock oscillator. Any number of minute physical factors will influence that, and drift is not something that software can fix, rather just monitor.

Chrony's job is to factor that drift into its time sync calculations and adjust the device's real time clock to compensate. If you are seeing high, but constant drift, then Chrony can easily compensate for that. If you are seeing wildly fluctuating drift, then this can be problematic for Chrony to deal with, and you will see large offsets appearing.

Chrony will select the best handful of servers to sync with on its own, so having a large pool of servers to select from is usually fine, as it will just use what it needs.
Three or four pools, preferably ones that are geographically local, and a couple of strategically selected individual servers is more than enough to guarantee enough time diversity for home use.

 

[JT Strickland]

Thanks. I sort of regretted posting it after the fact because it was such a trivial issue it seemed, and showed my lack of understanding of networking also. But I do that about every time I open my mouth, or fingers, but I understand it a lot more than I did thanks to you guys.

 

[heysoundude]

regional stratum-1 servers are more easily accessible/nearby than most people realize - try looking at your local university's engineering school/dep't, local datacenters/internet exchanges where people locate their servers...