Time too quick in debian, 72 minutes pass in system date in one real world second

Having trouble with system date/time in GNU/Linux/Debian: Time goes too fast for date, time, cron. The sleep command works fine, file modification times are correct. The issue explained via commands:

$ date
Mon Sep 12 05:27:46 CEST 2011

$ time sleep 1
real    71m13.403s
user    0m0.008s
sys     0m0.012s

$ date
Fri Sep 16 22:00:02 CEST 2011

Seems like, while the command "sleep 1" ran, and the command "date" was typed, 4 days passed. Well actually didn't. Ideas about what is going on are welcome.

$ uname -a
Linux the_hostname 2.6.18-238.19.1.el5xen #1 SMP Fri Jul 15 08:16:59 EDT 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

And yes, it is in a virtual machine.

$ hwclock --debug
hwclock from util-linux-ng 2.13.1.1
hwclock: Open of /dev/rtc failed, errno=2: No such file or directory.
No usable clock interface found.
Cannot access the Hardware Clock via any known method.

does this still happen after setting the time with ntp? otherwise try to use the rtc. I also read somewhere in a forum that if it is a 64 bit pc problem, someone suggested using the noapictimer kernel option to fix it. would be interesting what system you use and which kernel version for better pinpointing the failure

EDIT: I think it has something to do with the xen kernel and time issues there. Check these pages:

(Time went backwards problem)

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-users/2010-01/msg00037.html

(fast clock)

http://idolinux.blogspot.com/2009/02/xen-and-fast-clock.html

or google for xen kernel and time issues. there is quite a lot of discussion about this topic