Clock drift on Windows

Question

I\'ve developed a Windows service which tracks business events. It uses the Windows clock to timestamp events. However, the underlying clock can drift quite dramatically (e.

Answer 1

What servers are you running? In desktops the times I've come across this are with Spread Spectrum FSB enabled, causes some issues with the interrupt timing which is what makes that clock tick. May want to see if this is an option in BIOS on one of those servers and turn it off if enabled.

Another option you have is to edit the time polling interval and make it much shorter using the following registry key, most likely you'll have to add it (note this is a DWORD value and the value is in seconds, e.g. 600 for 10min):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\TimeProviders\NtpClient\SpecialPollInterval

Here's a full workup on it: KB816042