Tips/tricks for a new NTP server operator?

Hi, I also just recently added 2 servers to the pool, one in the Asia region, other in the Netherlands.

The traffic patterns are wildly different between the two regions. The nl server handles 400-700 requests/second with a netspeed of 1Gbit, while the asia one handles 10k to 63k requests a second depending on the time of day with a netspeed setting of 500 Mbps. The data usage was 200 GiB on this day, with maximum of 44 Mbps of network speed in both directions. It’s great fun if you like handling lots of requests, but also pay attention so you don’t run out of your allocated bandwidth limits, as we know how the asia region is with that. The traffic peaks around 04:00 UTC and 12:00 UTC, while the lowest is at 21:00 UTC. Only around 1% is IPv6, while the netspeed for the IPv6 addresses are set to 3Gbit.

I just increased the netspeed to 1Gbit today. This will probably be the max I can handle while staying in bandwidth limits.

Also, turn off conntrack for the NTP ports. A reminder for nf_conntrack - #2 by lordgurke otherwise you will see messages like nf_conntrack: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packetin your dmesg output.