Re: Occasionally high root dispersion shortly after start

Miroslav Lichvar <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.time.chrony.user
Message-ID <Y8/+BNJULij2cbl0@localhost>
On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 04:35:48PM +0100, [email protected] wrote:
> Note the root dispersion of more than 400 seconds. As a result, some clients
> discard NTP responses from this chrony instance for almost 20 minutes.
> 
> Network operations employing our devices have stated they strongly prefer
> minimizing NTP traffic and server load, so lowering minpoll is not a viable
> option, unfortunately.
> 
> Is this behaviour intentional? If so, is there a configuration option I could
> set in chrony.conf to work around the issue?

It is expected if you don't have a driftfile. With the iburst option
there are 4 measurements made over just ~6 seconds, which gives a huge
uncertainty in the measured frequency.

If you cannot enable driftfile to avoid wearing out the flash memory,
you could generate one on start on tmpfs with a skew matching the
maximum expected error of the clocksource, e.g. "0.0 50.0" for
0.0 +/- 50 ppm. This should make the dispersion rate after iburst more
reasonable and acceptable for clients.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar


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