What's the use cases of burst and iburst in NTP server setting?

[#1]

Hi;

The explanation provided at

https://docs.infoblox.com/display/NAG8/Using+NTP+for+Time+Settings

is providing details about what burst and iburst are but not details about why they are useful. Can anyone give me a good use case example.

Kindly

Wasfi

[#2]

Hello there,

BURST and IBURST in NTP is useful for initially and quickly calibrating a system clock. Note that the packet spacing is about 2s in NIOS's NTP for both BURST and IBURST, unlike the traditional 16s (for IBURST) in default NTP, this is to further hasten the synchronization of clocks.

BURST sends a burst of eight packets when the server is reachable, and is used to accurately measure jitter with long poll intervals.

IBURST sends a burst of eight packets when the server is unreachable (tries to find out if a host is reachable), and then shorten the time until the first sync. We specify the NTP IBURST for faster clock synchronization. This option is considered “aggressive” by some public NTP servers. If an NTP server is unresponsive, the IBURST mode continues to send frequent queries until the server responds and time synchronization starts.

NIOS enables both of these option by default when an NTP server is added and the configuration is saved.

Hope this helps.

Regards.