Databento
Sponsor
I'm pleased to announce that Databento's public time service is now available.
Getting started
This is a free public time service that's available to everyone over internet and public cloud. Anyone can synchronize their clocks against our service by pointing their NTP client at ntp.databento.com.
History
We were inspired to provide this service because our feeds so fast that many customers were reporting negative latencies when differencing local timestamps against our outbound timestamps. We found this was mostly an artifact of time synchronization error between our clock source and the customers' in such situations. This made it hard for latency benchmarking, and called for a way for customers to get a more accurate time and higher precision time sync against Databento's internal clocks.
Architecture - How it works
Our time service is composed of a pool of stratum 1 NTP servers at the CyrusOne Aurora I and Equinix NY4 data centers, making it the world's first public NTP service that is explicitly housed in financial data centers and optimized specifically for systematic trading users.
Since the margin of error in time synchronization is largely a function of distance and hops to the time source, Databento's time service helps users obtain more accurate timestamps than common time providers like Google and Cloudflare, whose time servers are usually situated in general-purpose data centers that are further from popular colocation and proximity hosting sites used by financial firms.
Another important reason to use Databento's time service is the nature of its clock source. The time servers for our service are synchronized against the same PTP time source used for supplemental receive and outbound timestamps in our data, within 200 nanosecond tolerance:
In turn, our PTP source is based on a pair of grandmaster clocks engineered for electronic trading and high-frequency trading firms, with <25 nanosecond root-mean-squared error against UTC. Other public NTP services do not provide any guarantees about their clock sources—even if you were to obtain a time sync to their NTP servers with sub-millisecond tolerance, you may still be off from UTC by tens of milliseconds.
Who should use this?
Databento's time service is ideal for users using proximity hosting services and public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP, and for customers whose servers are located in the Chicago and New York/New Jersey metro regions.
While more accurate time synchronization practices exist, the next marginal improvement for these users will generally require dedicated hosting or cross-connects, and run as much as $1,075 per month as a managed service.
About Databento
Databento provides APIs that make it simpler and faster to get market data. To learn more about Databento, go to databento.com.
Getting started
This is a free public time service that's available to everyone over internet and public cloud. Anyone can synchronize their clocks against our service by pointing their NTP client at ntp.databento.com.
History
We were inspired to provide this service because our feeds so fast that many customers were reporting negative latencies when differencing local timestamps against our outbound timestamps. We found this was mostly an artifact of time synchronization error between our clock source and the customers' in such situations. This made it hard for latency benchmarking, and called for a way for customers to get a more accurate time and higher precision time sync against Databento's internal clocks.
Architecture - How it works
Our time service is composed of a pool of stratum 1 NTP servers at the CyrusOne Aurora I and Equinix NY4 data centers, making it the world's first public NTP service that is explicitly housed in financial data centers and optimized specifically for systematic trading users.
Since the margin of error in time synchronization is largely a function of distance and hops to the time source, Databento's time service helps users obtain more accurate timestamps than common time providers like Google and Cloudflare, whose time servers are usually situated in general-purpose data centers that are further from popular colocation and proximity hosting sites used by financial firms.
Another important reason to use Databento's time service is the nature of its clock source. The time servers for our service are synchronized against the same PTP time source used for supplemental receive and outbound timestamps in our data, within 200 nanosecond tolerance:
Code:
MS Name/IP address Stratum Poll Reach LastRx Last sample
===============================================================================
#* PTP 0 0 377 1 +9ns[ +11ns] +/- 159nsIn turn, our PTP source is based on a pair of grandmaster clocks engineered for electronic trading and high-frequency trading firms, with <25 nanosecond root-mean-squared error against UTC. Other public NTP services do not provide any guarantees about their clock sources—even if you were to obtain a time sync to their NTP servers with sub-millisecond tolerance, you may still be off from UTC by tens of milliseconds.
Who should use this?
Databento's time service is ideal for users using proximity hosting services and public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP, and for customers whose servers are located in the Chicago and New York/New Jersey metro regions.
While more accurate time synchronization practices exist, the next marginal improvement for these users will generally require dedicated hosting or cross-connects, and run as much as $1,075 per month as a managed service.
About Databento
Databento provides APIs that make it simpler and faster to get market data. To learn more about Databento, go to databento.com.
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