Tagged “trading”

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Topics In Timekeeping

Why do you want precise time?

Precise time is seldom the goal. It is the price of admission for something else — which is why the requirement usually arrives from outside engineering.

Accurately measuring elapsed time

A clock so bad the internet refuses to talk to it still measures a microsecond-scale interval to about a nanosecond. Short durations forgive both ways a clock can be wrong, and knowing when you are measuring one saves real money.

Do timestamp errors average out?

No. The archer gets ten arrows and can average them; a network packet is timestamped once. That difference decides which errors you can tolerate — and it moves all the work to before the event.