Should You Change Your NTP Servers?

When I started working with distributed systems fifteen years ago, one of my first production incidents was caused by clock drift. A simple five-second difference between servers caused duplicate transactions, corrupted data, and hours of debugging. That experience taught me to take time synchronization seriously. Today, most operating systems come pre-configured with NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers, and for most users, those defaults work perfectly. But should you change them? The answer, like many infrastructure decisions, is: it depends.