The issue of NTP requests exceeding bandwidth load

Welcome to the forum, @kkursor !

With an estimated 132,000,000 Internet users potentially accessing 9 servers, there is a ratio of about 14,666,667 users per server. More than, e.g., in South Korea, but less than in China (these are rough numbers only, the actual number may differ, but I think the order of magnitude gives a good enough indication). So it’s likely that it’s not only the typical issue of an underserved zone.

Looking at the history of number of servers in the Russia zone, there seems to be a clear drop from about 123 servers 60 days ago to the current 9. So very roughly (depending on “netspeed” settings of servers that left), that could explain an increase by a factor of above ten. Which would mean you might have gotten about 30 Mbps before the drastic drop in the number of servers. Which seems somewhat high, but is not impossible, depending on how you “positioned” your server in the pool. E.g., if this was not at home on a DSL line, but maybe some datacenter, or professional network setting.

Anyway, it is not clear what your “netspeed” setting is, but that would be the first knob to twitch. I.e., either gradually decrease that until the load is acceptable. Or, since the load currently is way beyond, my recommendation would again be to go to the 512 kbit/s setting to see what the “baseline” is, and work your way up from there until you reach the maximum target load. Or probably somewhat below what would be acceptable, owing to the granularity of steps available for the “netspeed” setting.

Note that in the China zone, it seems the 512 kbit setting can produce peaks of almost 10 Mbit/s, so it should be less in the Russia zone.

If you don’t mind sharing, knowing what server we’re talking about wouldn’t hurt. Though is not as relevant as in the case of the Cina zone because it seems clear from your description that in this case, the issue is not suspected to potentially be due to the placement of monitors, or some international connections.