Let's reduce our use of network time server synchronisation!

[E-waste]

There are way too many NTP servers. in my opinion. 

 

Addition: For many systems the Linux based NTP pool (run by volunteers), globally has 4,400 computers in the pool give or take.  They state that the use of their service is constantly increasing and they need more and more and more servers to keep up.

 

My opinion is that 99% of all desktop PCs will function without issue, with zero network-based time synchronizationn.  If we instead manually set our clocks based on the ckock on a wall or oven or even our smartphones, that would be absokutely adequate to use our devices, without any clock-based issues ever.

 

How much effort would it be to glance over at a clock on your wall, microwave, oven, coffee maker, watch or vehicle radio, and match your bios and operating system clock to that!

 

Imagine how much less demand these time servers would have!  So much less demand that we'd really only need maybe one available, if we would use it only when absolutely required, with no possible other method to set our time available to use.

 

We could eliminate the need for hundreds of thousands of servers, just by having every member and visitor of this forum turn off network time sync, with just a simple uncheck of a box and clicking OK.

 

What do you say, are you with me?

[Mark Kaine]

im pretty sure i can sync my pc to my modems clock... which obviously syncs with some kind of server... doesn't seem to be worth the hassle?

 

now if you know how to make my virus update definitions not to come from 2 minutes in the future anymore,  im all ears!

 

 

26 minutes ago, Timpster said:

We could eliminate the need for hundreds of thousands of servers, just by having every member and visitor of this forum turn off network time sync, with just a simple uncheck of a box and clicking OK.

generally good idea, but truth is pcs are terrible to keep the time, my laptop is *never* online and after a few months the clock is wrong by 20-60 minutes!  (even though i also never fully turn it off)

 

 

[tikker]

40 minutes ago, Timpster said:

There are way too many NTP servers. in my opinion.  How much effort would it be to glance over at a clock on your wall, microwave, oven, coffee maker, watch or vehicle radio, and match your bios and operating system clock to that!

None of those clocks are accurate. That is the core problem. When your microwave is 1 minute ahead of mine, but my coffee maker is 46 seconds behind your radio who knows what the correct time still is?

15 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

generally good idea, but truth is pcs are terrible to keep the time, my laptop is *never* online and after a few months the clock is wrong by 20-60 minutes!  (even though i also never fully turn it off)

Clock drift. Another reason why you'd want periodic syncing. Even if you punch in the correct time now, most clocks will start to drift away from that reference because they tick a little faster or slower.

[BondiBlue]

40 minutes ago, Timpster said:

How much effort would it be to glance over at a clock on your wall, microwave, oven, coffee maker, watch or vehicle radio, and match your bios and operating system clock to that!

It's not about the effort. How can you guarantee that all of those clocks are both accurate and in sync? How can you guarantee that they're in sync not just with each other but also with clocks everywhere else? You can't if there's nothing connecting them all that helps keep them set properly, and for a lot of those clocks they're on their own. Why is having many NTP servers even a problem in the first place?

 

43 minutes ago, Timpster said:

What do you say, are you with me?

Not me. I'd like the clock on my computer to be accurate. Feel free to disable NTP for youself though. 

[Mark Kaine]

20 minutes ago, tikker said:

Clock drift. Another reason why you'd want periodic syncing. Even if you punch in the correct time now, most clocks will start to drift away from that reference because they tick a little faster or slower.

yeah, but that's regress... our kitchen oven is pretty old and has obviously no internet connection and the digital clock is off by maybe 2 or 3 minutes/ per year... i also remember analog clocks were pretty accurate,  like  a minute or two in a couple of months... thats not really an issue , just a small annoyance,  but today's computer clocks seem highly inaccurate thats a problem if you don't know its 20 minutes off or what, more or less randomly. 

 

And well, op still has a point,  why couldn't a country have like 2 or 3 time servers that are highly accurate with a huge bandwidth,  we don't need hundreds, or thousands of those (also a security risk btw)

 

 

14 minutes ago, BondiBlue said:

How can you guarantee that all of those clocks are both accurate and in sync?

But that's the thing unless your occupation is rocket surgery or something you do not need a highly accurate and in sync time... how did people manage before the 2000s? i would say better than we are now (regardless if thats related to accurate clocks or not) 

i just don't see an inherent advantage here... did you miss your train? well they're usually late anyways and then you kinda just have to get there 5 minutes earlier... not an issue with a traditional quartz clock that doesn't necessarily need an external power source like a battery btw. 

[tikker]

1 minute ago, Mark Kaine said:

yeah, but that's regress... our kitchen oven is pretty old and has obviously no internet connection and the clock is off by maybe 2 or 3 minutes/ per year... i also remember analog clocks were pretty accurate,  like  a minute or two in a couple of months... thats not really an issue , just a small annoyance,  but today's computer clocks seem highly inaccurate thats a problem if you don't know its 20 minutes off or what, more or less randomly. 

 

And well, op still has a point,  why couldn't a country have like 2 or 3 time servers that are highly accurate with a huge bandwidth,  we don't need hundred,  thought of those (also a security risk btw)

Naturally the drift will vary and for an oven it of course doesn't really matter, but when communcation is involved a few (milli)seconds off my be recipe for trouble. Benign situations may be your updates arriving from the future, but I can imagine other things not liking messages with uncertain timestamps. Perhaps in computers the clocks are cheap. Like good enough with regular syncing, but not that reliable for long-term performance.

 

Why many, my guess would be both redundancy and load balancing. Part of the load would be alleviated by increasing bandwidth, but I can imagine if you only have 3 you still have a small number of critical failure points. Not only the servers themselves. That huge bandwidth might needs some special or dedicated infrastructure, so what if the routes to the timeservers get compromised in terms of speed or reliability? How do you ensure the rerouting is reliable etc. I don't know if "enough" would be 20, 200 or 2000, but I could imagine why you would want "many".

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, Timpster said:

There are way too many NTP servers. in my opinion.

Why do you hold this opinion? What functionality do you think NTP servers are providing that isn't needed? We didn't spin 'em up for no reason. 

[Mark Kaine]

59 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

Why do you hold this opinion? What functionality do you think NTP servers are providing that isn't needed? We didn't spin 'em up for no reason. 

well im not OP, but who operates these servers, and who controls them?

Also if we could use less (and we probably could)  it potentially would save a lot of energy.  

 

1 hour ago, tikker said:

How do you ensure the rerouting is reliable etc. I don't know if "enough" would be 20, 200 or 2000, but I could imagine why you would want "many".

yeah, sure idk how many are needed, but as said above i can easily see a situation where there are way too many, maybe half of them would be "enough" i dunno, but its an interesting question.

 

1 hour ago, tikker said:

Naturally the drift will vary and for an oven it of course doesn't really matter,

well, i was just saying older clocks were more precise (usually) 

 

1 hour ago, tikker said:

Benign situations may be your updates arriving from the future, but I can imagine other things not liking messages with uncertain timestamps. Perhaps in computers the clocks are cheap. Like good enough with regular syncing, but not that reliable for long-term performance.

i mean thats how this situation even arised... "modern" electronics like mp3 players,  smartphones etc, all with terrible cheap internal clocks needed a way to sync the time easily so these kind of servers was the solution... and now they kinda *need* that precise time, but there's no inherent reason why they would,  as said, it worked just fine without these always connected clocks before - for the most part. 

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

well im not OP, but who operates these servers, and who controls them?

They're clocks. Doesn't matter who controls them, they give out standard time.

 

As for who operates them... nearly anyone. NIST, US gov, Google, Microsoft, people with a homelab, your neighbor's dog if they have a computer with a static IP somehow. If you have a home webserver you can add it to the standard linux pool here: https://www.ntppool.org/en/join.html. In a shock to no one, they constantly need more servers for load balancing reasons. So literally what Tikker said above:

1 hour ago, tikker said:

Why many, my guess would be both redundancy and load balancing. Part of the load would be alleviated by increasing bandwidth, but I can imagine if you only have 3 you still have a small number of critical failure points. Not only the servers themselves. That huge bandwidth might needs some special or dedicated infrastructure, so what if the routes to the timeservers get compromised in terms of speed or reliability? How do you ensure the rerouting is reliable etc. I don't know if "enough" would be 20, 200 or 2000, but I could imagine why you would want "many".

 

A lot of very smart people have put the internet together, there's usually a reason infrastructure runs the particular way it does.

[tikker]

12 hours ago, Zando_ said:

A lot of very smart people have put the internet together, there's usually a reason infrastructure runs the particular way it does.

I wouldn't be surprised if we are "stuck" with some things simply because it would be too major or expensive ot overhaul, but yeah I agree.

12 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

i mean thats how this situation even arised... "modern" electronics like mp3 players,  smartphones etc, all with terrible cheap internal clocks needed a way to sync the time easily so these kind of servers was the solution... and now they kinda *need* that precise time, but there's no inherent reason why they would,  as said, it worked just fine without these always connected clocks before - for the most part. 

I would say "it worked just fine" on a surface level or because we couldn't yet do better. We in our daily lives don't need highly accurate synced clocks directly, but they have their place. It doesn't matter if our watches are 5 minutes apart or if they run slower, but for things that rely on timing it is rather important that you can trust the timestamps. As a niche example, radio astronomy needs to correct for nanosecond level clock drifts, GPS requires precise and accurate clocks to be able to do what it does.

[Vishera]

14 hours ago, tikker said:

Clock drift. Another reason why you'd want periodic syncing. Even if you punch in the correct time now, most clocks will start to drift away from that reference because they tick a little faster or slower.

My daily driver suffers from a severe case of clock drift so i have to synchronize it more than i would like to.

 

14 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

how did people manage before the 2000s? i would say better than we are now (regardless if thats related to accurate clocks or not) 

I was alive back then so i can tell you,

There were call centers which you could call and they would tell you what time it is.

Also the news on TV would also give us the time, GPS synchronized clocks were also a thing.

[Mark Kaine]

4 hours ago, tikker said:

GPS requires precise and accurate clocks to be able to do what it does.

yeah, i forgot about gps... cause i don't use it much (maps tends to not send me where i want to go anyways???) but of course thats still useful tech... 

But then again I wonder why gps doesn't just sync your clock the moment you connect to it...

 

im basically just thinking its weird we connect to more or less random time servers and usually don't even get asked... some of that stuff sure seems redundant and a bit questionable security wise...

 

basically "just trust me bro time"

 

yet for every game etc windows asks if you want to allow a connection (and often enough that connection is unnecessary... i mean i had single player games ask me that... *mashes deny*... )

 

4 hours ago, Vishera said:

My daily driver suffers from a severe case of clock drift so i have to synchronize it more than i would like to.

 

I was alive back then so i can tell you,

There were call centers which you could call and they would tell you what time it is.

Also the news on TV would also give us the time, GPS synchronized clocks were also a thing.

i remember people had "atomic clocks" that were getting their time over radio wave or something... it was a pretty hip thing... for a while... lol

[E-waste]

@Vishera

 

I'm interested, about how many minutes off is your device, within a month?  Also would you be willing to, instead of connecting with a time server, set a reminder of some kind and just adjust the clock manually when required?

[Mark Kaine]

15 minutes ago, Timpster said:

I'm interested, about how many minutes off is your device, within a month?  Also would you be willing to, instead of connecting with a time server, set a reminder of some kind and just sync it to the clocks that are in your home?

Think you quoted the wrong person. 

 

But idk if nothing syncs, all clocks will be wrong anyhow?

 

Thing is i think ur supposed to sync everything to your router,  but nobody does that so every device has its own clock server to sync with.

 

So efficient!  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Needfuldoer]

52 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

i remember people had "atomic clocks" that were getting their time over radio wave or something... it was a pretty hip thing... for a while... lol

Good old WWVB, WWV, and WWVH.

 

 

 

 

[E-waste]

Yeah Mark, your post was the one containing a quote of Vishera, so I edited my post soon after.

 

Thank you for the NTP pool organization link @Zando_ here are the numbers for the pool, and I'll add this to the top post.

 

I thought the numbers would be SIGNIFICANTLY higher, but global there are 4,439 servers.  This is only for ntp pool .org. If we turned off time sync on things like virtual machine test systems, tablets and smartphones, and only sync when absolutelh critical to human safety security, or activity tracking to catch a criminal, just imagine the decreased demand for these 4,400+ computers!

 

There are at least two (or three) billion windows computers in use around the world, guessing more.  I'm willing to bet more than 97% of those machines individually hit the default windows.time.com ntp server.  Who knows how much traffic NIST receives.

 

If we all gave just a small amount of thought as to how often we sync our clocks, and how we do so (offline vs network) I think it would make an absolutely MASSIVE difference to our energy use, from just this setting alone.

[Zando_]

17 minutes ago, Timpster said:

If we all gave just a small amount of thought as to how often we sync our clocks, and how we do so (offline vs network) I think it would make an absolutely MASSIVE difference to our energy use, from just this setting alone.

How much energy do you think NTP is using? And as I think I asked before, why is NTP the issue vs the other far less necessary and far more power hungry tasks we run (for example, a single Nvidia DGX A100 box for enterprise AI model training pulls up to 6.5kW, and those are made to run in fat clusters in a datacenter, not alone)? LTT has even made a video on atomic clocks and NTP:

[Alex Atkin UK]

On 1/6/2023 at 10:02 PM, Timpster said:

There are way too many NTP servers. in my opinion.  How much effort would it be to glance over at a clock on your wall, microwave, oven, coffee maker, watch or vehicle radio, and match your bios and operating system clock to that!

 

Imagine how much less demand these time servers would have!  So much less demand that we'd really only need maybe one available, if we would use it only when absolutely required, with no possible other method to set our time available to use.

 

We could eliminate the need for hundreds of thousands of servers, just by having every member and visitor of this forum turn off network time sync, with just a simple uncheck of a box and clicking OK.

 

What do you say, are you with me?

Accurate time is essential for encryption to work, if your time is off even slightly you will find no secure sites will connect at all.  So its a little more important than "setting it to more or less the right time with the kitchen clock".

 

You can already reduce usage if you have a good router, let the router perform as an NTP client and server - then your entire LAN only needs to sync to the router.  On pfSense I even have a rule to prevent LAN clients being able to hit any server other than itself, so that Windows hard-coding its time server gets redirected also.

[E-waste]

20 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

Accurate time is essential for encryption to work, if your time is off even slightly you will find no secure sites will connect at all. 

You're right, I've noticed this before, but I disagree with the "slightly off" and I don't think it's as strict as you think.  I mean, you can test it immediately.  Set your clock two hours back, or 2 hours and 45 minutes back, and see how far you get.  I'm testing now.  I can still connect to websites such as nascar (one of my go to "off the top of my head" websites to test connection) leafly, and other websites.  I'm just gonna leave it like this to prove my point.  Not to be a jerk, I just want to show it works more often than not.  I don't see any issues.

 

It was 6:18, I set my clock to 3 something, and stuff still works.  You give it a go!  I'd like to know others experiences.

 

You definitely have a cool setup, with a pfsense router and NTP redirection, and syncing it with all LAN devices, that's wicked!

[tikker]

10 hours ago, Vishera said:

My daily driver suffers from a severe case of clock drift so i have to synchronize it more than i would like to.

I'm glad the biggest issue I deal with is Linux and Windows always having a one-off between what time it is. The time is always wrong by an hour after syncing in one and switching back to the other.

 

4 hours ago, Timpster said:

If we all gave just a small amount of thought as to how often we sync our clocks, and how we do so (offline vs network) I think it would make an absolutely MASSIVE difference to our energy use, from just this setting alone.

Why start with time servers from this point though? They are arguably one of the most critical pieces of the puzzle.

12 minutes ago, Timpster said:

You're right, I've noticed this before, but I disagree with the "slightly off" and I don't think it's as strict as you think.  I mean, you can test it immediately.  Set your clock two hours back, or 2 hours and 45 minutes back, and see how far you get.  I'm testing now.  I can still connect to websites such as nascar (one of my go to "off the top of my head" websites to test connection) leafly, and other websites.  I'm just gonna leave it like this to prove my point.  Not to be a jerk, I just want to show it works more often than not.  I don't see any issues.

 

It was 6:18, I set my clock to 3 something, and stuff still works.  You give it a go!  I'd like to know others experiences.

 

You definitely have a cool setup, with a pfsense router and NTP redirection, and syncing it with all LAN devices, that's wicked!

To my knowledge that is because they will simply check for valid certificates and not an exact  "hey what time is it now". If you change your time by a few minutes, or even a few hours chances are that those certificates are still valid. Set it back days or weeks, or to the future and you are probably more likely to start running into issues where the certificate has expired or hasn't started being valid yet.

[E-waste]

Just now, tikker said:

The time is always wrong by an hour after syncing in one and switching back to the other.

Sounds like BIOS / UEFI system time is totally off.  Maybe a new CMOS battery?  Who knows, have you reconfigured the time in there?

[tikker]

27 minutes ago, Timpster said:

Sounds like BIOS / UEFI system time is totally off.  Maybe a new CMOS battery?  Who knows, have you reconfigured the time in there?

Last I checked it was just a mismatch in UTC vs timezone or DST and what each OS assumes the clock was in, but I hardly every use Windows so I never put myself to actually fix it.

[Vishera]

7 hours ago, Timpster said:

I'm interested, about how many minutes off is your device, within a month?  Also would you be willing to, instead of connecting with a time server, set a reminder of some kind and just adjust the clock manually when required?

Around 4 minutes.

[wseaton]

For internal networks i put an open source time server on my main widows server or domain controllers. This way devices like cameras or non domain member computers can get time updates without having to deal with the internet. Only the master computer has to time sync. I rarely see devices anymore more than a minute off. If you need closer time sync than within a minute its not a common application.

 

 

[E-waste]

16 hours ago, wseaton said:

For internal networks i put an open source time server on my main widows server or domain controllers.

What software did you choose?  Also how frequently are you polling upstream, and what time servers have to choosen as upstream?

 

The NTP pool group is overworked and are needing more and more nodes to keep up with ever-increasing demands.  I'm hoping I can start the thought train with something as boring and dull as time syncing, and shed some light on how much we use it.  I'd like us to think if we need such down-to-the-minute accuracy, or could we be perfectly satisfied, with only syncing monthly, or even every time-shift for DST vs standard.