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Benderlast Monday at 5:27 PM2 repliesview on HN

Google's proposal is a smear. [1] Most time servers do not use smear. No idea what behavior it may introduce in places where sub-second time is important. Curious if all these bugs [2] were fixed specifically to deal with going backwards.

[1] - https://developers.google.com/time/smear

[2] - https://rivassec.com/leap-second-chaos-2012.html


Replies

yen223last Tuesday at 7:49 AM

The brilliant thing about the smear is that it distributes the new second across each second of the day, so that each second differed by 1/86400 seconds, well within the margin of error for NTP.

As far as the computers were concerned, nothing was different.

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ikirisyesterday at 7:47 PM

Yeah 90% of the time the simple solution is just use Google time and these problems are smeared away because they got burned enough internally they did it themselves