Silly question about "The time now is ..."

[MikeBCda]

Hi all,

I've noticed that at the bottom of each page, "The time now ..." typically shows a couple of minutes slower than my own system time, which I know is fairly accurate. This system (and my previous two, on totally different processors with different BIOSes), pretty consistently gains about a minute or so a month, and I'll re-synch it to one of the atomic-clock thingies once or twice a month. That makes it handy for a "standard" reference for setting other clocks and watches around home.

Totally off-topic, every so often I'll run something that suddenly jumps me ahead about 5 to 10 minutes, and one of these millenia I'll have to pay closer attention to find out what's doing that.

Back to topic -- am I correct in assuming that "The time now" is based on the system time on your board-server system(s), adjusted for my time zone, rather than read off my own system like some software does?

Thanks and best,
Mike

[LowWaterMark]

Yes, the time at the bottom of the page is from the this server's clock, adjusted to the time zone offset in each member's profile. For guests it shows the actual time for the time zone the server is located in, which is the Eastern time zone now under daylight savings time.

The server's clock syncs with public time servers and is rarely off by more than 20 seconds, so I'm not sure why you are seeing it minutes off at a time.

[MikeBCda]

Thanks Mike,

One possibility just occurred to me about the minor difference -- the time you show isn't "live", so if I stay on a page for a bit then obviously (I assume) it's going to retain the time when I first reached the page, unless and until I refresh. As I'm posting this, your time is showing about 6 minutes slow, until I finish and return to the topic page.

Over at one of my support groups, Brain Talk, the time there is consistently about 5 minutes fast, and we've got a running gag going with the operator that he's got his own "proprietary time zone".