Threads

[Hal Murray]

> What use case on the internet would be saturating a Gb link with NTP? Surely,
> before that, we should be recommending a second server closer to the clients?

NIST has multiple servers at several locations.  Some of them are running 100K 
packets per second average.  I don't know what the busy times look like.

With no authentication or other extensions, NTP packets are only 48 bytes.  
When everything goes right, I can get over a million 48 byte packets/second 
through an echo server.   That's using 85% of the wire.

With NTS, packets are 232 bytes.  That only takes 400K packets/second to fill 
up a gigabit link.

Of course, the real answer is that I was poking around trying to understand 
what a busy server would look like and what would be the limit.  With NTS, our 
current code can only handle 90K packets/second.  That's 1 CPU running flat 
out.  It's using 1/4 of the wire.  Modern CPUs have lots of cores.  With 4 
threads...

The more I think about it, the more I think that threads will clean up the 
code.



-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.