Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by guipsp 1426 days ago
They will be wrong by at most one second. And being wrong doesn't even matter, as long as everyone (or rather, all your servers) agree.
1 comments

At most half a second, in the middle of the smear at midnight when the leap second is applied.

The Facebook smear is asymmetrical so it starts off 1 second off just after the leap second, and subsequently corrects itself.

[ The reason Google and Amazon use a linear smear is because NTP clients try to measure the rate difference between their local clock and the reference clocks; if that is different every time the NTP client queries its servers, it will have trouble locking on and accurately matching the smear curve. You can mitigate this somewhat by fixing a higher NTP query frequency, but that’s a heavy-handed fix for an engineering mistake. ]