When a program writes bytes to the file system, those bytes aren't guaranteed to arrive on the underlying, permanent storage. They're cached for some variable amount of time in the memory of the host operating system.
In UNIX, calling fsync will force the OS to flush any outstanding writes to the underlying storage, which should mean they're safe. So far so good.
Nicer RAID controllers have a lot of high speed memory memory, and they are basically their own operating system. When they receive a write from the host OS, and their battery is good, they lie to the host OS and say that the write went through all the way to disk/SSD, even though it probably didn't. This has the effect of making the fsync call return a lot more quickly.
The bytes are still safe in this case because if there's a power loss of the whole server, there's enough battery power left to allow the controller to write through any data it lied about writing.
When the battery goes bad, by default the RAID controller will cease its lying about when the bytes it receives are written all the way through, which has the effect of slowing things down.
I can't say how lower IO performance caused the https problem in question without more details, but there are a lot of possible correlations.
NB: For brevity, I simplified a lot of how this stuff works, so some of what I said above isn't 100% accurate as stated.
What is the learn cycle?
"The purpose of the learn cycle is to determine the condition of the battery. The learn cycle charges, fully discharges, and then recharges the battery in order to determine the condition and health of the battery. The battery full charge capacity degrades over time and a battery is deemed completely degraded when it can no longer hold a charge for 24 hours and must be replaced."
Source: https://discuss.pivotal.io/hc/en-us/articles/204955498-FAQ-G...
And if you disagree, please explain...so that we can all learn and understand.
Also the server time doesn't matter for TLS. It's the client that has to verify the certificate validity. (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5246.html#section-7.4.1.2 "Clocks are not required to be set correctly by the basic TLS protocol")
So no, raid battery should have nothing to do with the system clock.
Thanks for taking the time to link the relevant section of the RFC. I'll remember this next time (or at least know where to check quickly ;) )
2. The clock on the server wouldn't have anything to do with the RAID array. If I disconnect a hard drive, my motherboard still gets along fine.