You might get warning messages of the following form:
warning: thread engine timer 0: expired 7 times since last handled
These warnings occur for the following reasons:
- sfptpd is blocked on other operations completing.
For example the engine thread might be stuck on a syscall for I/O because of contention with another process on the system. A common cause of this is external monitoring scripts that use ethtool to obtain low level data from any network interface on the host, because these take the same kernel lock that is used for time sync operations called by sfptpd.
- sfptpd is not getting enough CPU time.You can detect if the sfptd process is getting descheduled using the scheduling stats from
cat /proc/<pid>/sched
for the applications:-
nr_involuntary_switches
records the number of times the process was descheduled, for example due to an interrupt handler or another task running on the same CPU core. -
se.nr_migrations
is the number of times the process has moved to a different CPU core.
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