[time-nuts] Google NTP Servers and smearing leap seconds...

Christopher Quarksnow cquarksnow at gmail.com
Thu Sep 15 21:30:48 UTC 2011


It's interesting to see the title "*Why time matters at Google*" in the blog
when Androis bug 5485 has not been fixed in over two years, and most
Android-based phones are 15 seconds fast, as GPS-disciplined rather than
UTC. It appears only Samsung got around....
When hearing about this, Daniel Gambis at IERS told me that there was such
as strong momentum to drop leap seconds (ITU, etc...), yet the "damage" is
done !

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 16:34, Doug Calvert <dfc-list at douglasfcalvert.net>wrote:

> Time Technology and leaping seconds
>
>
> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/time-technology-and-leaping-seconds.html
>
> "The solution we came up with came to be known as the “leap smear.” We
> modified our internal NTP servers to gradually add a couple of
> milliseconds to every update, varying over a time window before the
> moment when the leap second actually happens. This meant that when it
> became time to add an extra second at midnight, our clocks had already
> taken this into account, by skewing the time over the course of the
> day. All of our servers were then able to continue as normal with the
> new year, blissfully unaware that a leap second had just occurred. We
> plan to use this “leap smear” technique again in the future, when new
> leap seconds are announced by the IERS."
>
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