Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp

How NTP Works

Let's assume that there was only one clock in the world that gave the correct time, and that this clock is 100 percent accurate, 100 percent of the time. We'll call this our “reference clock.”

Obviously, if we only had the one reference clock it would soon become overloaded as everyone tries to determine the correct time from it. We would need some way of balancing this load across more clocks.

Now let's say that we only allow 10 clocks to query our reference clock, and that everyone else has to get the correct time from one of these. The overloading would be vastly reduced because we have increased the number of clocks that can be queried. These new clocks would probably not be quite as accurate, but would be good enough for most ...