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0 pointsbaq2y ago0 comments

I guess you’ve never had to correct the local time to UTC for handoff to a different system and the conversion was buggy in the wrong direction? Or haven’t had to figure out which 2:30am something happened? Or why something that usually takes a second took an hour?

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lxgr2y ago· 2 in thread

I've had to do all of these things many times, but keeping server times on UTC doesn't really help with most of them:

Customers, partners, stakeholders all think in terms of local time zones, as do I; some amount of conversion is inevitable.

Ultimately, local time is a presentation layer concept, so why shouldn't I configure that presentation layer so that I have to do one less conversion in the most common case (of figuring out when something happened relative to my wristwatch or that of most of my customers)?

JohnMakin2y ago

Are you saying you should configure the server to local time to save you one less configuration on the presentation layer? That doesn't make sense to me. I really can't think of any benefits to setting the server to local time that doesn't offset the huge load of negatives.

Here's something you may not be thinking about - your presentation layer may save a configuration step, but now every system that interacts with your server (who have all likely defaulted to UTC) have to know about this now. Think - logging infrastructure, schedulers, cloud infra, etc. So now you have to configure all those as well. Anything that touches the host will need to be reconfigured to save one very minor and commonly done thing on the presentation layer. Really doesn't make sense, as an infra guy.

lxgr2y ago

> every system that interacts with your server (who have all likely defaulted to UTC) have to know about this now.

No, why? Almost all APIs/interfaces use zoned timestamps or seconds since the Unix epoch.

The argument of “servers must run in UTC” sounds a bit like “servers must run with an English locale” to me in that sense, as if the locale changed the name of API parameters or enum values instead of just human-readable strings.

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