> Hany explains: “Due to physics, at certain times of the year, the Earth moves faster along its orbit than others. How do we base time off of this, then?”
Sorry, but no. This is so wrong I don't know where to start.
How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)
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Re: How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)
#12> Hany explains: “Due to physics, at certain times of the year, the Earth moves faster along its orbit than others. How do we base time off of this, then?” Sorry, but no. This is so wrong I don't know where to start.
It's not wrong really, Earth's orbital velocity does indeed vary. It just doesn't have anything to do with leap seconds
Re: How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)
#13I recall this hitting our startup’s various MySQL Linux servers in 2012.
They were slow/maxed out for a while till we figured it out. The DBA rebooted a few but didn’t know why and it kept cropping up on others; I drilled into root cause with some google-fu.
Not mentioned in the article is that I think this issue occurred again in 2015. I don’t recall if it hit us because we hadn’t patched/upgraded some servers since 2012 (!) and had just relied on resetting the clock/rebooting, or there were more Linux bugs (see LWN below).
Good technical writeup from Linux weekly news: https://lwn.net/Articles/504744/
And more on Linux patching in 2015: https://lwn.net/Articles/648313/
IANA canonical list of leap seconds: https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdb-2018a/leap-seconds.lis...
Re: How a leap second caused havoc with the Internet (2021)
#14We've already discussed the Leap Smear, where clocks run 0.0012% slower for a day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28047714 https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
And inevitably there is also Leap Unsmear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223591 By Google. Who started this whole trend of leap smearing in the first place.
Actually, before 1972 they would run the radio time signals several parts per million fast or slow to keep in step with the earth's rotation.