[author]

NTP runs fairly decently in a VM. Don't take my word for it — look at the graphs of my servers:

Here's my Google VM, notice the jitter is within +/- 5 milliseconds:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/104.155.144.4

Here's my Hetzner VM (Germany). +/- 10 milliseconds, though I can't help but suspect the distance from the monitoring station (Los Angeles) may have more to do with it than being a VM:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/78.46.204.247

Here's my AWS VM. Much worse than Google in that it's +/- 50 milliseconds, but still good enough to pass muster with pool.ntp.org:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.0.56.137

Here's my Azure VM. It's in Singapore, and I re-deployed it last night, so the numbers are still coming in, but it has a pretty tight distribution:

http://www.pool.ntp.org/scores/52.187.42.158

Everyone's needs differ, I suppose, so some might consider that "decent". 10ms -- or even 50ms -- might be acceptable for many (most?) use cases but not for me.

From a quick look, my own (stratum 2) server in the pool currently has an offset of just under 1/20th of one millisecond.

Regardless, thanks for contributing to the pool!

For another data point, here's my Digital Ocean droplet in Bangalore which sees from 10-60k queries per second depending on the time of day: http://www.pool.ntp.org/user/bradfa

Interesting stats. Thanks!

I had the same thought. Does the world really need another (presumably) stratum-3 server running in Amazon's cluster, when Amazon already runs a pool of stratum-2 servers? ([0-3].amazon.pool.ntp.org).

By my recent reading of the AWS docs, those pool addresses are not run by Amazon. They are DNS names that allow NTP load from AWS to the NTP pool to be distributed more fairly.

It's a vendor zone, anyone can register for a vendor zone...

Ok, interesting.

You're not supposed to run an NTP server on a VM. The CPU cycles can be taken from the guest and perhaps used by the host or another guest. Other options that are available, is to drill a hole in the data center and run a GPS receiver to the roof and get the time from the GPS satellites. I think that is something many VPS/cloud providers will not allow.

Edit: s/your/you're/

t1.micro to boot - with more than the usual nondeterministic statmuxing and arbitrary "fairness" policy.

[author]

Yeah, maybe that's why my AWS instance is the most jittery of my 4 timeservers (Google, Hetzner, Azure).

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