I just noticed an interesting traffic pattern on my pool server's logs: 
NTP traffic went up a huge amount right before the transition to January 
1, 2009. You can see the change here:  
http://www.somebits.com/ntp/one%20month.html

Requests / second went up from my usual 25 to nearly 300, a 12x increase.

Some of the traffic may be new clients (I see a 3x spike in unique IPs), 
but a lot of it looks like existing clients sending more requests. 
Usually a single IP sends an average of 3 requests / 10 minutes, but 
during the spike interval it goes to 9 requests / 10 minutes, for a 3x 
increase. It's possible that's actually new clients sharing IP addresses 
of a NAT router.

The oddest thing is the duration of the spike. I'd expect it to be a 
brief spike around 00:00 Jan 1 UTC as clients flubbed the leap second. 
But in fact the increase starts almost two days before and peaks several 
hours before 00:00.

Any guesses what happened? Did other pool servers see the same spike? I 
have more data that could be analyzed if someone's really excited.

PS: the pool server monitor thinks my offset was below 10ms most of the 
time over this time period.

_______________________________________________
timekeepers mailing list
[email protected]
https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers

Reply via email to