NTP Pool Server in India
About a month ago, LWN ran an article about the NTP pool system. I’ve been meaning to learn more about NTP and how the pool system works because I’d like to be able to setup a vendor zone for my dayjob employer in the near future and so I figured it was as good a time as any to dive right in!
I wanted to setup my server somewhere that it would be hit hard and also provide services to an underserved part of the world. India was the only country I could find where there was a low cost VPS provider and also a dearth of NTP pool servers…
So, I now run one of the NTP pool servers in India! You can see my server’s statistics as measured by the pool monitoring station on my pool user page. My server is a stratum 2 server, so it tracks the time from a handful of stratum 1 and other stratum 2 servers. At peak times my server is serving almost 1 million clients and doing upwards of 10 Mbps inbound and outbound network traffic, which I find quite impressive!
My server is hosted on Digital Ocean (that’s a referral link) in their BLR1 zone in Bangalore, India on a $5/month droplet, and I’m quite happy with it. Currently, Digital Ocean does not actually track network transfer totals, which is a good thing, as I expect my total monthly transfer will be in the 2 to 3 TB range.
Although at this point my NTP pool account lists an IPv6 server, it is due to be removed from the pool in a week or so. When my server is in the IPv6 pool, there are times when CPU usage goes extremely high and my server starts to fall behind in responding to NTP requests but I’ve not yet been able to debug why this sometimes happens. By removing my server from the IPv6 pool, this issue completely goes away, so at least for the short term, this is my remedy.
It’s interesting to watch my network transfer rates, during normal business hours, there’s a steady level of NTP traffic at about 8 Mbps, then around dinner time it starts rising up to a peak around 10 Mbps, then finally around midnight it starts to taper off down to a minimum of about 2 Mbps. This cycle happens consistently, day to day, and week to week. I still need to setup local monitoring and have it produce pretty graphs, I just haven’t gotten to that, yet.
The official “How do I join pool.ntp.org” web page states, “Currently most servers get about 5-15 NTP packets per second with spikes a couple of times a day of 60-120 packets per second. This is roughly equivalent to 10-15Kbit/sec with spikes of 50-120Kbit/sec.” which might be true for servers in the west, but is definitely not true for underserved parts of the world. I see thousands of packets per second on my server.
If you’d like to set up an NTP server and have it join the world-wide NTP pool system, I highly recommend it! You can find underserved parts of the world to focus on by drilling down within the Global region listing. I’ve found that the Africa and Asia regions are not well served, especially India and China, but both countries have quite large online populations. India is much easier to find hosting providers, in my experience, so that’s where I focused.