There is more than one cause. Check the forums, its full of this issue. The definite cause for me on a celery dell laptop was the gnome battery applet. It has a known bug (fixed???) where it stalls the machine whilst reading /proc under apm.
On a later machine with a much faster p4, you can sometimes see it wandering a little, but never as much as previously. ide accesses (esp burning cd's) was another cause. Check the unmask irq and dma. Chrony seems a little more tolerant and trouble free than ntp under these conditions, but I think ntp does a better job on a normal system. BillK On Fri, 2003-07-04 at 17:42, Joel Palmius wrote: > On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Robert Bragg wrote: > > > My point was (I still think this is correct) that if his setup is > > resulting in his clock getting out of sync on a daily basis, by 20-30 > > minutes then he has bigger problems to think about before he starts > > playing with ntpd. > > True, true.. I stopped using NTPd because of this (it gave up like one > time in a week becuase the lag was too large). I'm back to syncing time > with home-made perl scripts instead. > > Although, what to do when it seems it is the system *software* that seems > to mess up time and there seems to be no explanation as to why? > > These are the explanations I've heard so far for the lagging time > behavior: > > * It's the power-save functionality of the kernel messing time up (No it > isn't, problem remains unchanged no matter if APM and APIC is enabled or > disabled) > > * It's a hardware error (no it isn't, since hwclock shows the correct > time) > > * It's a bug in the gnome clock applet (no it isn't, since I run KDE, and > besides the problem is the same in console mode) > > * It's a problem with settings of IDE disks and too aggressive hdparm > settings, with the result that the system doesn't have the resources left > to call the clock interrupt often enough (nope, I have a system entirely > built on SCSI. This one might still be true some similar way though, but I > don't know how to check it) > > * You haven't enabled RTC or RTC isn't readable (It is, I checked. Besides > VMWare complains loudly if RTC isn't available, and since VMWare keeps > quiet I think I did right) > > If someone else have any theories - no matter how far out, I will even > check for evil green goblins sitting in the chassis messing with the clock > chip - I will sure test them. > > // Joel > > > -- > [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
