Additionally, the pool infrastructure could make it easier for smaller servers to join the pool in underserved zones by officially supporting netspeed settings lower than the current 512kbit/s.
When even the currently lowest “official” setting results in traffic peaks of sometimes double-digit Mbit/s or even higher in some zones, that prevents many if not most smaller servers that provide much of the capacity in many of the better-served zones from joining.
There is a way to set lower netspeed values even today (and also other values outside the strict granularity of what the management page offers). But it requires some fiddling with low-level details under the hood of the management page that tech-savvy enthusiastic people may use, but that is too cumbersome to reach the scale needed to make a difference in underserved zones. I.e., people who’d be happy to join the pool but don’t have the know-how/time/resources/inclination to dig into such low-level aspects, sometimes repeatedly until a satisfactory setting is found, will not be able to join. Which is a pity, because looking through this forum, this comes up time and time again. But without resolution leaves potential server hosts frustrated and turning away from the pool, when, as you rightly write, “[e]very single server counts”.
Sure, this wouldn’t solve the issue all by itself, and some “cover” is needed by bigger servers to allow smaller ones to thrive in their shadow - not only when a “small” server would be the only one in its country zone. But it would be a starting point.
An argument against small netspeed values often seen is that the resulting allocation of load would not be “accurate”. But not sure how relevant that is in an underserved zone where people would be happy to be able to join the pool at all, regardless of whether the load they get is an “accurate” share of the load in that zone. Or even in better-served zones.
I am not even sure what the point of that “accuracy” is. What I (in mostly better-served zones), and I guess other people, especially those unable to join the pool in underserved zones, are concerned about is the absolute load they get, because that is what determines whether it is ok, or too much.
Whether that load now accurately reflects the share of the overall load of that zone, i.e., a server’s relative netspeed in relation to the sum of netspeeds of all active servers in that zone (as shown in the “Client distribution” section of the management page of each active server) is definitely interesting, and certainly gives various indications as to a server’s performance, or about the zone it is in, and the “health” of both.
But the accuracy of that relative share seems pretty much secondary to the question of whether a server can cope with the absolute traffic rate a certain setting induces. Case in point being that even the pool pages say it is only a relative value, and the fact that the same netspeed setting results in wildly differing absolute traffic loads depending on the zone being looked at.