Clock Instability And Its Effect On Time Intervals In Performance Studies

Workstations in a local area network environment must provide a time service that is synchronized with the other clocks on the LAN. To stay synchronized, computers on a network exchange information about the time via a time service protocol and adjust their own clock accordingly. These adjustments make the system clocks unstable (or tick unevenly). Unstable clocks introduce errors in the measurement of intervals as is done in performance studies, workload characterization, and serialization of distributed events.