# Does all zones serve US requests? **URL:** \ **Category:** Server operators\ **Created:** [October 20, 2025, 7:34am UTC](https://community.ntppool.org/t/does-all-zones-serve-us-requests/4106 "2025-10-20T07:34:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 29
**Author:** ![MagicNTP](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/858c86/32.png) [@MagicNTP](https://community.ntppool.org/u/MagicNTP)\ **Post date:** [October 24, 2025, 8:33pm UTC](https://community.ntppool.org/t/does-all-zones-serve-us-requests/4106/29 "2025-10-24T20:33:53Z")
> [@errolt](#): > > Not causing issues for me. Ok, good. > [@errolt](#): > > I wish I could increase traffic Yeah, same here for some of my servers. You could pick some nearby zones with only a few servers in them, and ask at [server-owner-help@ntppool.org](mailto:server-owner-help@ntppool.org) whether they can add those zones to your server. Though note that as others have also experienced, for some reason, it is a bit like lottery as to whether a request will be processed, and when (slightly better than real lottery, actually, but still not really understandable why somewhat frequently, and somewhat randomly, requests fall through the cracks). Also, pool staff seem to be predominantly located in well-served zones, without any experience of how difficult life can be in underserved zones, and that clients in such zones might prefer to get service from far away servers, rather than getting crappy service from local servers (and local operators might be welcoming additional capacity offloading their servers, or allowing additional smaller servers to join, like happened in Bas’ case in Belgium). So [as others seem to have experienced as well, staff refuse to add zones that they consider “too far away” from the server](https://community.ntppool.org/t/tech-report-on-s-ntp-clients-behavior/4107/2). (But clients are obviously free to explicitly configure far-away zones if that raises the perspective of getting decent service from the pool - potentially explaining why the countries with the second-largest and third-largest shares of traffic on my server in the UK are China and the Russian Federation, even though traffic from the UK still is first by a large margin.) > [@errolt](#): > > I assume that ZA is over served? > [@errolt](#): > > “3Gbps” local capacity, with a total of 5000pps. I wouldn’t say _over_ served, but certainly among the better-served zones globally. I’d expect a personal server at a 512Kbit setting might still get too much traffic to join, similar to Bas’ before the other servers helped out in the BE zone, with now slightly less than 3000pps for BE and NL, and IPv4 and IPv6, combined. (Slightly more than 2000pps in Germany, slightly more than 3000pps in France, almost 4000pps in the UK, slightly more than 4000pps in Spain, almost 9,000pps on the East coast of the USA, and more than 10,000pps on the West coast of the USA – all of those current short-term snapshots as of right now, so might be higher or lower on average.) > [@errolt](#): > > I don’t go above around 0.65X my “3Gbps” local capacity That number suggests a well-served zone. > [@errolt](#): > > But most monitors suffer as they have a RTT of 200ms to 400ms(and that gives bad scores and says that my time is 500ms slow?), Hmm, as of _right now_, I don’t see that the monitors would generally give bad scores to your server, or say that your time is generally off by too much. There always is the odd outlier, or a few where for various reasons, the offset is unusually high (or where there is noticeable packet loss). On the one hand, that is why there are now more servers, and in somewhat more diverse locations (though the pool is still strongly biased against what are typically underserved zones, e.g., by selecting references for the monitors primarily from North America, Europe, Japan and Taiwan, thus putting monitors outside those regions at a disadvantage, e.g., in India). On the other hand, it has previously been suggested that the scaling of the graph should perhaps be based more on the majority of monitor results, rather than having a single, or a few outliers blow up the entire graph. > [@errolt](#): > > so it’s not like I can assist elsewhere… Not at all. It’s just that in somewhat recent past experience, pool staff refuse to allow that (while some zones, such as China, still have a notable number of servers from “far-away” regions helping out from when that was still accepted). Despite being reiterated time and time again in this forum that larger RTT is not _necessarily_ an issue (though obviously, statistically speaking, likelihood for path asymmetries and packet loss increases with larger RTT), and despite people in underserved zones potentially preferring to get served by a server that is further away, rather than getting crappy, or no service, from a local server. --- _[View the full topic](https://community.ntppool.org/t/does-all-zones-serve-us-requests/4106)._