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Gabrys1yesterday at 9:55 AM1 replyview on HN

Having clocks synchronized between your servers is extremely useful. For example, having a guarantee that the timestamp of arrival of a packet (measured by the clock on the destination) is ALWAYS bigger than the timestamp recorded by the sender is a huge win, especially for things like database scaling.

For this though you need to go beyond NTP into PTP which is still usually based on GPS time and atomic clocks


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riedelyesterday at 11:03 AM

Actually interesting to think about what UTC actually means and there is seems to be no absolute source of truth [0]. I guess the worry is not that much about the NTP servers (for which people anyways should configure fail overs) but the clocks themselves.

[0] https://www.septentrio.com/en/learn-more/insights/how-gps-br...

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