Wired ran a highly circulated article last night regarding a leap second issue that quickly caused a number of popular websites to have issues, including Reddit and Mozilla.  Java was mentioned – as one might expect from such a highly pervasive platform.

Mozilla seems to have been early to learn and report that the core issue is related to highres timers on linux, and in particular applications that make use of ntpd – the Network Time Protocol Daemon.  There has been some code activity related to that in the kernel lately, but it’s not clear to me (as a self-admitted linux-n00b) if that code is live, or somehow related – please check in with your linux provider to see what they’re recommending.  It’s not certain that’s the (or only) issue, but it seems to be the way the internetz are leaning at the moment.

In addition the Mozilla’s link, there seems to be a really good analysis and discussion on the issue happening over on serverfault.  Worth checking out.

If anyone stumbles upon any other sites with good technical information, please let me know!

– Don