Constant pinging of time2.google.com

My home assistant box is pinging googles time servers 2-4 times every few seconds, which seems rather excessive. I’m assuming this is for the NTP…but is there an option to reduce to this to once every 10 minutes or something more reasonable? It has pinged time2.google.com over 5600 times in the last 12 hours, per pihole.

I would think that once per second would be sufficient for NTP, but I am unaware of any user settings for this.

But, I have a question for you. How do you know that Home Assistant is pinging NTP this often?

I run Home Assistant Operating System on a raspberry pi 4, so only HA is on this device and pihole shows all of the queries being from this IP. I did find this link which has some information about NTP at the bottom. Although it indicates “NTP=time.cloudflare.com”, the same file on my instance shows “NTP=time1.google.com time2.google.com time3.google.com”, so that checks out.

That’s just as excessive as:

Once per second is way too much for NTP. That is typically 64 to 1024 seconds — trending towards the latter once sync is established.

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Here is a thread that may help.

I did find that, but it looks more focused on changing the NTP server as opposed to changing the frequency? Nevertheless, I’ll read it all now to better understand it.

However, a restart seems to have fixed my issue in the meantime. I think that last time the rpi was started it somehow got stuck in a weird state that caused that. I thought I’d already tried restarting, but maybe not?

By the way this has nothing to do with ping. Ping is not ntp.

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Nickrout is correct.
Ping is using the ICMP protocol and NTP is using the UDP protocol port 123.

Something else have to be running,like, monitor for connectivity or dynamic DNS.