Well, a whole lot of mail today! I'm sorry if I missed or repeat something...
On 09/12/2005 06:42 AM, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote: > This is for the people advocating that the empty-ish country zones > should be filled up with other nearby servers. I think the first question is: can country codes help solve *our* problems? If the answer is yes, then the next question is: what must we do to make clients use the country code? If I recall correctly, one of our problems is the high load on servers that happen to be listed in the DNS for pool.ntp.org. This cannot be easily reduced by the DNS servers, because of minimum caching time etc. I guess if all/many clients use country codes, then we reduce our 'high load' problem. If this is correct, then we should continue with country codes (filing them all somehow with 'enough' servers). Even if we fill 'empty' countries at random, then it will still help *us* (if clients use them), right? Next thing, how to make it attractive for clients to use country code, can be the simple answer: provide better servers than random. For example, for Luxembourg leave out servers in Australia, etc. > I probably won't do that, but we can do something else to the same effect. > > However, to make it work I need a "map" mapping countries to other > nearby countries. > > dk => se,no,de,uk Perhaps it is better/easier to start with an ordered list of all countries (with servers) for each country, like: dk=>se,no,de,uk,...,us,...,au In this list it is not so important if 'se' should be before 'no' or not. Then, cut the list at, for example, 25-50% of the servers, i.e. take the best 100-200, or so, servers for that country. With this approach changes in network topology are not really relevant. The number of servers should be high enough to actually help load sharing. If we have the statistics, then we might put more servers in a country code that generates a large number of requests. However, lets first agree on the question if country codes help solve *our* problems (and which problem(s)). IMHO we should not come up with new region codes, as the current system is already known to a broad public, and it is used in books and other publications. Kind regards, Arnold &:-) _______________________________________________ timekeepers mailing list [email protected] https://fortytwo.ch/mailman/cgi-bin/listinfo/timekeepers
