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kazinator • today at 6:04 PM • 0 replies • view on HN

I'm skeptical that this one minute jitter period is solely attributable to one minute timers in power inverter equipment. It's likely the net scale effect of all cron-like scheduling of actions in everything with a microprocessor. All the long-term scheduling that is done with minute precision (i.e. seconds field is implicitly :00) regardless of its individual period. Like if one device is scheduling at x:17 and x:47 every hour, another one is doing x:06, x:09, x:12, x:15, ... and numerous other combinations, at scale, the common divisor will be one minute. If wall clock time is used, all the devices that are synchronized to a network time will have cron-like scheduling events firing at xx:xx:00 for all values of x.

This type of scheduling should be randomized at the seconds level, perhaps. Unfortunately, it would require a massively coordinated effort across numerous operating system and application stacks.