We have tried to add multiple servers to the CN zone few years ago Adding servers to the China zone
But as you all could understand, things will decay naturally over time, those servers did helped a lot but only few of them still work today, so the situation of CN pool is getting bad again.
I’ve tried to add few more new nodes to the pool, however, it seems recently the pool only allow servers physically located near China to be added, e.g., my JP nodes are ok but EU ones are not.
The reality is that bandwidth in Asia are generally far expensive than EU and US, it’s hard for individuals to keep expending money on pool servers physically located in the region. So once some servers got kicked out of the pool, other servers collapse quickly, not only for the network flood, but also caused by server bills.
There are some big companies & orgs in China providing public NTP services, but 1) They don’t have reason to join pool and validate their IPs, and 2) Someone added their IPs to the pool long ago anyway, but the monitor system don’t like them and keeps kicking them out of the pool, so hardly could they help.
I think it would be a very useful feature to allow node operators being able to opt-in to certain “extra zones” directly in thier manage panel pages, then who wish to help could easily add their server to CN zone, as well as other zones with very few servers, and opt-out as they desire. This could also avoid massive human resource needed for pool admins as today we need manual operations to add a non-China server to the CN zone.
I want to point that the problem of CN zone is not an issue of service quality, but of service availability. Requiring best network quality of servers in the zone (to China clients) does not really make sense, and is proven to only lead to collapse of the zone and unavailability to those clients. A server located other side of the earth with slightly worse quality is far more useful than a server with perfect network access but not able to answer. Besides, I didn’t feel any problem with a NTP server ~300ms away, which may only increase few ms of error/deviation comparing to a near one.
I believe some other Asia zones are sharing the same problem. I know TW zone had this issue few years ago, and I see there is a post about VN zone facing exactly the same problem as CN zone does. Vn.pool.ntp.org is down!