In a ticket what a blog Published on November 21, 2022, Meta, parent company of Facebook, explains that it wants to transform the synchronization protocol of its global servers to improve the experience of Internet users.
Nanosecond sync
Most Internet-connected devices today use Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their internal clock. This synchronization between the servers and between the machines that access them is essential for allowing the computers to simultaneously display the desired information. Anyone who has ever played an online game with a poor connection knows that the experience is severely degraded, because the longer it takes for information to reach a server, the longer it takes to execute.
More simply, sending an instant message depends a lot on good synchronization. “Think of something as common as sending a message on Messenger. Thanks to network synchronization, someone can send a message to a friend on the other side of the world and see it appear in real time. This cannot happen if the synchronization between the servers is not correct”, Meta points. Facebook and the latter will then switch to a new synchronization protocol, called PTP (Precision Time Protocol).
PTP has a big advantage over NTP. It is in fact able to synchronize different machines with an accuracy close to the nanosecond (one billionth of a second), where the NTP is limited to the millisecond (one thousandth of a second). “Features like messaging, video conferencing, online gaming, and even updating or deleting content rely on exact synchronization across multiple servers, sometimes even across multiple data centersexplain Ahmad Byagowi and Oleg Obleukhov, two Facebook engineers. The higher the number of servers, the stronger the synchronization. If a single server is out of sync with the others, it can cause significant slowdowns and errors.”
Showing the right information at the right time is critical for a company like Facebook, especially in the metaverse that Marc Zuckerberg’s company has been struggling to build for a year. When all servers are synchronized, interactions are smoother, more natural and therefore feel more “real”. “PTP will benefit current products and services and be a key technology in the development of the metaverse”says the Facebook blog post. The PTP protocol isn’t perfect (no protocol can be), but thanks to an accurate measurement of network latency, it is able to compensate for this delay by adding a few nanoseconds to the time it takes to send a packet over the network.
This protocol imagined in 2001 it is widely used today by network operators, who are very concerned about synchronization. But deploying it to Facebook is a challenge, as the company has servers to sync around the world. The company therefore had to thoroughly overhaul the operation of its network to operate the switch. Good news, the work of Meta teams is available in open source. Let’s hope that with its imminent adoption, video calling is no longer a fest of speakers interrupting each other.
