I haven’t been paying too much attention to my NTP server, but some e-mails on the list about problems with the monitoring server got me to look at my server’s stats. Apparently the monitor experienced a bit of network turbulence and started considering everyone to be way off.

I was looking a bit at my local NTP stats. The last polling interval stepped my clock forward 5.024ms. This is perhaps more than I’d like; sometimes the offset is less than a millisecond.

So I started wondering what sort of accuracy this was. My server was happy with its sources, so it’s at the longest polling interval: once every 1,024 seconds, it’ll check. Thus, over 1,024 seconds, I lost 5.024ms.

Some quick calculations show that this is a 0.000491% error. I guess I’ll take it.