2025 / Week 21

2025-05-20

Lately I’ve been trying to find (and understand) the limits of time syncing between Linux systems. How accurate can you get? What does it take to get that? And what things can easily add measurable amounts of time error?
After most of a month (!), I’m starting to understand things. This is kind of a follow-on to a previous post, where I walked through my setup and goals, plus another post where I discussed time syncing in general. I’m trying to get the clocks on a bunch of Linux systems on my network synced as closely as possible so I can trust the timestamps on distributed tracing records that occur on different systems. My local network round-trip times are in the 20–30 microsecond (μs) range and I’d like clocks to be less than 1 RTT apart from each other. Ideally, they’d be within 1 μs, but 10 μs is fine.
It’s easy to fire up Chrony against a local GPSTechnically, GNSS, which covers multiple satellite-backed navigation systems, not just the US GPS system, but I’m going to keep saying “GPS” for short.
-backed time source and see it claim to be within X nanoseconds of GPS, but it’s tricky to figure out if Chrony is right or not. Especially once it’s claiming to be more accurate than the network’s round-trip time20 μs or so.
, the amount of time needed for a single CPU cache miss50-ish nanoseconds.
, or even the amount of time that light would take to span the gap between the server and the time source.About 5 ns per meter.
I’ve spent way too much time over the past month digging into time, and specifically the limits of what you can accomplish with Linux, Chrony, and GPS. I’ll walk through all of that here eventually, but let me spoil the conclusion and give some limits:
GPSes don’t return perfect time. I routinely see up to 200 ns differences between the 3 GPSes on my desk when viewing their output on an oscilloscope. The time gap between the 3 sources varies every second, and it’s rare to see all three within 20 ns of each other. Even the best GPS timing modules that I’ve seen list ~5 ns of jitter on their datasheets. I’d be surprised if you could get 3-5 GPS receivers to agree within 50 ns or so without careful management of consistent antenna cable length, etc. Even small amounts of network complexity can easily add 200-300 ns of systemic error to your measurements. Different NICs and their drivers vary widely on how good they are for sub-microsecond timing. From what I’ve seen, Intel E810 NICs are great, Intel X710s are very good, Mellanox ConnectX-5 are okay, Mellanox ConnectX-3 and ConnectX-4 are borderline, and everything from Realtek is questionable. A lot of Linux systems are terrible at low-latency work. There are a lot of causes for this, but one of the biggest is random “stalls” due to the system’s SMBIOS running to handle power management or other activities, and “pausing” the observable computer for hundreds of microseconds or longer. In general, there’s no good way to know if a given system (especially cheap systems) will be good or bad for timing without testing them. I have two cheap mini PC systems that have inexplicably bad time syncing behavior,1300-2000 ns.
and two others with inexplicably good time syncing20-50 ns
. Dedicated server hardware is generally more consistent. All in all, I’m able to sync clocks to within 500 ns or so on the bulk of the systems on my network. That’s good enough for my purposes, but it’s not as good as I’d expected to see.

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