Continental vs network geography (or, "Africa and Asia are big", or "modelling the Mediterranian")

1

So I was running traffic stats on this de server and found out that it’s barely processing any packets at all compared to by ipv6 cn/hk machine. Well, it’s not unexpected, but I do want this server to do a little more than just sitting around…

From geographical intuition I then thought about writing an email to add my server to the North African zones like I’ve done with this cn/hk (originally cn) server. But there are too many countries to ask for! Maybe we should automate this.

The current continental division works well for well-connected continents like North America, Europe, and possibly South America, but it is inadequate for representing Africa where (1) landmass size prevents simple coverage by submarine cables (2) several “blobs” of population and backbone-dense areas exist (3) some blobs are better served by servers outside of the continent than within. (Refs: ITU Infrastructure Map, Global Human Settlement Layer.)

Maybe we should cut these continents into several “logical continents” to the point that the latency from one end of such a “logical continent” to the other is roughly comparable to the latency from one end of North Am to the other. I haven’t thought of how to do it precisely with global ping data (and not just “staring at a map”), and simply splitting does not actually address the issue of connecting NAf with EU unless we also introduce the concept of a graph of logical continents…

Welp, honestly I’ll take anything that lets users in North Africa use my machine assuming they followed the pool instructions for their country.

1 Like
2

If you are seeking more IPv6 traffic for your server, I don’t think Africa is going to help much. There’s also the additional latency issue, and with longer distances the probability of asymmetric routing increases.

I would very much rather prefer that IPv6 usage would get expanded to other subzones than just the 2.pool, bringing all pool servers more IPv6 traffic.

3 Likes
3

I also see the problem with rigid divide between continents or having large countries as single zone when for time synchronization it would be the best to serve the physical local area. For example I evaluated one VPS provider in Israel (Asia zone) for a month and saw a lot of traffic from the far away corners of China when it would be more useful to serve closer countries like Turkey (Europe) or Egypt (Africa, no pool servers).

I don’t know if the DNS server take into account physical location within country like US that would assign the closest servers because the client will choose the best provided one anyway and rest of the pool offers will get needless traffic instead. Breaking up of the large countries into local states would be useful then.

On the other hand there are underserved continents like Africa and South America that will get far away servers anyway and in that case it would be useful to assign EU/NA servers that already have low load (despite being set to the highest netspeed) which could comfortable help out in the global zone.

2 Likes