system clock is too slow

[Jeff Ratliff]

On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 11:17:35PM -0400, Erik Hemdal wrote:
> 
> I've only seen this happen on systems that are extremely heavily
> loaded.  When the system runs near 100% load all the time, the real-time
> clock interrupt gets starved, and the clock drifts back.  And the only
> time I've seen this occur is with a computer running a heavy compute
> load, like the SETI at Home daemon or the Folding at Home program.  I'd
> investigate this if you are running programs like this and your computer
> sits otherwise idle for a long time.
> 
I've experienced this on one of my systems. I've been running the 
distributed.net client, which pushes CPU load to 100%, and the 
processor is also significantly overclocked (around 10%). Under Windows 
I'd have the system lose 15 minutes or more a day. After reboot the 
clock would be right again. I don't have this problem under Fedora, 
but I assume ntpd is the cause of that. 
  I'm pretty sure the problem went away when I backed off the 
overclock. I don't run Windows enough any more  to test this. I know 
when I stopped using Windows the system was keeping good time and I 
was still running distributed.net with no overclock. 
  I had another system that ran stock speeds on a new motherboard,
ran distributed.net, and lost time. I think both factors are worth 
checking out.