Adding servers to the China zone

Server operators
275

To summarize what I believe are the challenges:

  1. There is a significant amount of traffic to the cn zone
    • At least 150Mbit, probably more than 500Mbit based on reports in this thread
  2. There is significant packet loss international -> China
    • This affects traffic from the monitoring server to NTP servers in China
  3. There is significant packet loss China -> international
    • This affects client’s ability to reach international servers
  4. There is currently far more client traffic than NTP server capacity
  5. Typical VMs bought by individuals have 1TB/mo~20TB/mo bandwidth included
    • This is around 3Mbit~60Mbit
    • To handle this load with individual’s VMs, it would take around 170 of them
  6. Handling more than 10kpps (~7Mbit) of NTP requires special software or hardware

So, with all those challenges, what can we do?

  1. Drop traffic when client load is greater than NTP server capacity
    • This could be done as an empty DNS response
    • This has its own problems
  2. Have a much lower score threshold for the cn zone
    • This would allow services to stay in longer in the face of packet loss and add some additional capacity
    • This would also make it harder for servers to signal they wanted to leave due to billing or other reasons
  3. Recruit a mix of high bandwidth and low bandwidth servers to handle the load
    • That’s how this thread started
    • The low bandwidth users would want some sort of way to limit their max bandwidth due to billing
    • Servers in China have a hard time staying in the pool due to issue #2
  4. Setup a monitoring server in China
    • Who could provide a place for this to run?

What I would like to see is a combination of all four. This would require work and co-ordination to complete, and that is a problem on its own.

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