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metricsntp

Is there any published stats for public NTP servers

Public NTP servers metrics and statistics are valuable source of data, I couldn't find any published stats for public NTP servers such as:

time.windows.com
time.nist.gov
pool.ntp.org

The data can be used to find a good estimate of total number of machines world-wide currently online. In addition to many more insights.

Is there any policy prevents publishing the stats?

Remark: As programmer want to perform data analysis on public NTP servers stats, I assume this is valid question for SO. If not, then suggest alternative.

Solution

  • The NTP Pool system is decentralized and doesn't keep statistics like this. A napkin-math estimate would be that the NTP Pool servers do millions of queries per second in aggregate.

    How clients behave varies wildly; I don't think you can infer anything else than "lots of clients as asking about the time" from that.