time.clock() going backwards??

[Sander Steffann]

Hi,

>>>I experimented something very strange, a few days ago. I was debugging an
>>>application at a customer's site, and the problem turned out to be that
>>>time.clock() was going "backwards", that is it was sometimes
>>>(randomically)
>>>returning a floating point value which was "less than" the value returned
>>>by the previous invokation.
>
> If I remember it right, the cause of such a problem is updating the
> clock by accessing a time server over a network. Just any such access
> results in adjusting the time a bit and leads eventually to such problems.

Usualy time is synchronized by making the clock run a little faster or a 
little slower until it is in sync with the timeserver. It shouldn't go 
backwards... A bad time-sync-program might ofcourse do this, but with a 
decent NTP client this shouldn't happen.

- Sander