I feel like this is a dumb question, in part because Ask explained it previously in what seems like simple terms, but I am finding that I still don’t fully get it. To use a concrete example, from a server of mine in Korea which has a netspeed of 10 Mbps:
kr 441.88 ‱ 43.15 ‱ (10.24x)
To borrow a phrase from Reddit, can you Explain Like I’m 5 what this statistic actually means? (Except, explain it like I’m a 5-year-old who’s okay with permyriad as a unit of measure.)
My interpretation was that 441.88 ‱ of all pool DNS requests from Korea included my server’s IP in the response. I’m more confused by the second part. Is it saying that, of all servers in the Korea zone which have a 10Mbps net speed, mine was only included in 43.15‱ of DNS responses? I’m not quite sure what to do with that.
Or do I have it backwards? Because I have a moderately low netspeed, I am only getting 43.15 ‱ of traffic (if DNS were a perfect representation of traffic), but if there were no netspeed setting, I would be getting 441.88 ‱ of traffic? (And if so, is it fair to infer that, with a 10 Mbps network setting and a 10.24x factor shown, the average netspeed is just over 100 Mbps?)
Realistically this is not particularly important, but I’ve stared at the numbers long enough that I’m curious now.
Your second number is exactly 10x mine to match 10x the netspeed. (Assuming mine was 43.151 and just truncated.) But the first number is only about 2x mine. Interesting! This makes me even more curious.
First off, for the not-so-hip participants like me, what the heck is ELI5? I’ve tried to interpret it in the way i18n is a typing shortcut for internationalization, or l10n for localization, but I can’t think of 5 letters to follow ELI that would mean something like explain or elaborate.
It’s not a dumb question. I suspect understanding it easily takes being in @Ask’s head, understanding intricacies of geoDNS, intricacies which most of us are relatively oblivious about.
Let’s start with the explanation given:
The units are in permyriad (‱, 1/10000). "100" equals one percent of DNS queries from the specified country.
The countries are ordered by number of DNS queries from each country answered with the server’s IP address. The second number is the server’s permyriad of the overall "netspeed" for countries configured for the server.
Notice the difference between “queries from the specified country” and “for countries configured for the server”. That’s where I start to get fuzzy on the meaning.
My best guess is the “Global points” number listed first, before the countries breakdown, reflects the share of all pool DNS query answers including the server. It’s unclear as there’s no explanatory text on the page for that number.
In the by-country breakdown, my reading is the first permyriad number reflects the share of DNS responses to queries originating from the given country which include the server.
The second number for a country is a bit of a mystery to me, because I am unsure how to interpret “countries configured for the server”. My guess is it refers to pool country DNS zones the server is included in, as reflected in the “Zones:” near the top of the page. Reading the tea leaves, I suppose the system is adding the netspeed configuration values for all servers included in that country zone to get the divisor, and the server’s netspeed configuration is the dividend, with the quotient then being the second number expressed in permyriad for a country. In other words, the proportion of responses to queries of the country zone, e.g. *.kr.pool.ntp.org.
The last number, “(10.24x)” in your example, is clearly the ratio between the first and second numbers, but I’m not sure what to make of that ratio. If my understanding above is correct, it’s the ratio of responses including the server to queries from the given country to the responses including the server to queries for the given country zone. OK, but so what? What should I make of that ratio, or in other words, why is that ratio included?
Hopefully @Ask will chime in sometime. It can be a while between times he pokes his head up here, presumably because he’s busy with his day job and/or other pool responsibilities. In other words, be patient
ELI5 - My interpretation and as mentioned in the original post is “Explain it like I am 5” but I am old enough to remember the moon landings so not always up to date with the latest
This would be the first time anyone ever told me I was hip.
ELI5 is “Explain Like I’m 5” (years old). Reddit has a community with that name asking about concepts that they need explained simply.
Ah-ha! I had read that text probably at least a dozen times and didn’t pick up on that distinction.
I think you’re right about this. (Not that I have any solid idea, but this sounds like an innately reasonable explanation and it jibes with the described text.)
In that case, I think I have a new potential understanding of this:
kr 441.88 ‱ 43.15 ‱ (10.24x)
441.88 ‱ of DNS responses that GeoDNS says came from Korea got my IP
43.15 ‱ of DNS responses for *.kr.pool.ntp.org got my IP
(I imagine the latter is maybe inclusive of things like the general Asia zone as well, and generic requests that get mapped to Korea.)
In that case, that 10.24x ratio is interesting, but I agree that I don’t quite know what it means. I wouldn’t expect that much of a difference?
Assuming my interpretation is correct, there are still fuzzy details questions such as you introduce with “I imagine”. I’ll ask @Ask:
Does the “queries from the specified country” number include only queries to the global zone, or does it also include queries to geographic subzones?
Does the “for countries configured for the server” number include only queries to the country zone, or also to the containing continent zone? (@n1zyy’s first implied question)
Does the “for countries configured for the server” number also count queries to the global zone from clients geolocated to the country zone? (@nizzy’s second)
It might make things clearer to underline or italicize “from” in “queries from the specified country”. Similarly, it might help comprehension to rephrase “for countries configured for the server” to “for queries to the specified country zone”.
Better descriptive text suggestions warmly welcomed.
My understanding: second number is the calculated proportion of netspeeds in a given zone. If a zone ZZ consists of a server of 512kbps and 3 servers of 3Gbps, the calculated proportion of the 512k server would be:
512k/(512k+3000000k*3)=0.0001706=1.706‱
However for unknown reason, the first number of actual showup rate of the 512k server differs, mostly above calculated value. Take the former kr servers for example:
The 100Mbps one has 10x calculated value of 10Mbps server, but only shows up in <2x of actual DNS responses. Another example of my own 512k server in tw zone:
Just to add another thought - my server, the 100Mbps server has been online for less than a week. Is the first number the proportion over a period of time?
but I am old enough to remember the moon landings so not always up to date with the latest