Maarten, The natural behavior of a bunch of oscillators near the same frequency is to become one giant phase-locked oscillator. Adding a bit of random fuzz at each poll turns each oscillator into a mini random-walk which breaks up that tendency. The fuzz is not a lot, like 10 percent.
Dave Maarten Wiltink wrote: > "David L. Mills" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > >>>>No, there is no random delay at startup. Each association starts one >>>>second after the previous one. The random backoff occurs only after >>>>a step. >>> >>>Is there also a random backoff after an increase of the polling >>>interval? > > >>No. However, there is a small dither of a few percent at all poll >>intervals to resist self-synchronization. > > > Wouldn't that be a nice feature to add? If it's currently polling a > server on, say second 100 (reckoned externally) of 256, to go to > either 100 _or 356_ of 512. > > I understand that there are already some random waits in the client > code and Internet servers are well protected by random noise. But > for large numbers of clients in a uniform environment that were all > started at about the same time, is there any way they tend to > naturally disperse across the final 1024s polling interval? > > Groetjes, > Maarten Wiltink > > _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org https://lists.ntp.org/mailman/listinfo/questions