> Basically you have a trade-off between frequency error and time offset. > IIRC, polling quickly will reduce the offset, but you get greater frequency > variations.
There is nothing magic about NTP. You have the exact same trade off if you try and sync your wrist watch to the big town clock on the tower. If you look at the tower every hour and set the wrist watch to match you will have very small offset between the watch and the big clock. But if you do this the _rate_ of your wrist watch will never be spot-on except by luck. On the other hand if you sync your watch once then wait a week or a month to see how much it has gained or lost you may see quite a bit of "offset" but now you have good data on the relative rates of the two clocks NTP did not invent this trade off, it existed 200 years ago. Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions