Danny Mayer wrote:

Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

NTP could do worse than to adopt the VMS 64 bit time format.  IIRC it
was a count of 100 nanosecond "ticks" since some date in (I think)
November 1857.

<snip>

The current 64 bit NTP timestamp wastes some bits in picosecond
precision.  I say "wastes" because even today's computers cannot
exchange time without an uncertainty of two or three microseconds and
those low order bits are meaningless noise.



That's for today. In 10 years that may very well not be true.


The limitation, I believe, is in the round trip delay. My Sun Ultra 10s, separated by a Cisco 1548M switch and a few feet of cable, show delays of the order of 4 microseconds at 100mb full duplex. Gigabit Ethernet might shave a little off of that but not a whole lot.

If you are getting time over the internet you don't, and won't, have a clue what the nanoseconds should be. Even over a fast LAN, the delay is a killer.

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