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Microsoft's Windows Time Service is not designed to, and does not maintain second accuracy:

http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2007/10/23/high-accuracy-w32time-requirements.aspx

What software is available for Windows servers that maintains better than 1 second accuracy across a small (same-site) set of windows servers?

Adam Davis
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  • Similar to, but not a duplicate of http://serverfault.com/questions/88330/increasing-the-accuracy-of-windows-2003-ntp-time-sync – Adam Davis Jan 22 '10 at 15:51
  • What type of requirements do you have that require sub 1 second time accuracy? – joeqwerty Jan 22 '10 at 23:17
  • @joeqwerty - The question is due to this (minor) issue: http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36610/so-server-time-sync but I'm also curious how this is handled for time critical applications in fields such as banking, trading, etc. My guess is they don't rely on windows for a time stamp - there are a variety of ways to get around this. But for sites like Stackoverflow, the cost of a 'real' time source might not be worthwhile, while a good NTPD can give you timing that's better than +/- one second. – Adam Davis Jan 25 '10 at 19:12

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I use a Windows build of ntpd, available from Meinberg, to synchronize machines on a LAN to a central ntpd server (which in turn synchronizes to a few remote stratum 2 servers).

The ntpd documentation states the following:

It [ntpd] provides accuracies typically less than a millisecond on LANs and up to a few milliseconds on WANs.

Phil Ross
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  • Thanks a lot, this seems to have resolved my problem (which was a diffeent one, namely that I can't figure out how to tell w32tm to /resync even when the time is a month off). – reinierpost Jun 12 '11 at 13:02