# Adding servers to the China zone

**URL:** <https://community.ntppool.org/t/adding-servers-to-the-china-zone/88>\
**Category:** Server operators\
**Created:** [January 4, 2017, 1:00am UTC](https://community.ntppool.org/t/adding-servers-to-the-china-zone/88 "2017-01-04T01:00:05Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 275

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**Author:** ![ddrown](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex016/user_avatar/community.ntppool.org/ddrown/32/11_2.png) [@ddrown](https://community.ntppool.org/u/ddrown)\
**Post date:** [March 4, 2019, 5:09pm UTC](https://community.ntppool.org/t/adding-servers-to-the-china-zone/88/275 "2019-03-04T17:09:49Z")

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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
  - For instance: [Getting beyond 10k qps?](https://community.ntppool.org/t/getting-beyond-10k-qps/757/28)
  - Firewalls also need to be considered carefully at speeds higher than this

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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_[View the full topic](https://community.ntppool.org/t/adding-servers-to-the-china-zone/88)._