Hello,
I was noticing occasional odd DNS lookups from my Pi that's running fr24feed - they were for NTP pool servers that are nowhere near me, and it was happening every 10min or so. This seemed odd, since all my machines are NTP synced to my local stratum 1 server.
I was seeing these hosts being looked up:
1.europe.pool.ntp.org
1.north-america.pool.ntp.org
1.asia.pool.ntp.org
1.oceania.pool.ntp.org
1.south-america.pool.ntp.org
1.africa.pool.ntp.org
I then realized that the fr24feed process tries to Sync time every 10 min or so, as per the log file:
2018-01-15 06:51:00 | [time][i]Synchronizing time via NTP
This is probably a setting that the end user should be able to disable, or you should alter this so that it just checks to see if the local clock is sync'd first, before trying to force it.... Or perhaps simply an enumerated option like:
Set system clock:
Your current utilization is also - technically - against the NTP Pool terms of use (I'd link to it, but I was warned not to post links as I'm a newly-registered user -- Suffice it to say you can find it on the "ntppool DOT org" web page ), as you should probably have created a vendor pool zone for fr24, and used that. Also, forcing every user to poll pools that are all over the world is silly, and often some of these pools may be small and not have as much capacity as larger pools. You are generating unnecessary load on the global pools, especially since normal NTP query backoff would settle around 1024 seconds (~17min), and you're polling more frequently than that (and to an unnecessarily large number of servers).
Sure, i t's smart to have a "sanity check" to see if the clock is correct, but other than at initial process startup, you really probably don't need to check more often than every hour, tops.
Checking to see if the system's clock is generally synched already (at least at process start) should be sufficient to avoid unnecessary traffic and unnecessary use of "all" the various global pools (which might traditionally not be expecting much traffic). Again, you really probably should not be specifying all of the various regional pools - just use the [0-3].pool.ntp.org hosts... but better yet getting a "vendor id" created for you, and using that.
Anyway, just trying to make sure the fr24 process is being as "friendly" as it should be, when dealing with the volunteer NTP pools
(n.b. I run several public NTP servers and have been contributing to the global NTP pools for a while now)
-Taner
I was noticing occasional odd DNS lookups from my Pi that's running fr24feed - they were for NTP pool servers that are nowhere near me, and it was happening every 10min or so. This seemed odd, since all my machines are NTP synced to my local stratum 1 server.
I was seeing these hosts being looked up:
1.europe.pool.ntp.org
1.north-america.pool.ntp.org
1.asia.pool.ntp.org
1.oceania.pool.ntp.org
1.south-america.pool.ntp.org
1.africa.pool.ntp.org
I then realized that the fr24feed process tries to Sync time every 10 min or so, as per the log file:
2018-01-15 06:51:00 | [time][i]Synchronizing time via NTP
This is probably a setting that the end user should be able to disable, or you should alter this so that it just checks to see if the local clock is sync'd first, before trying to force it.... Or perhaps simply an enumerated option like:
Set system clock:
- Every 10 minutes
- Once per hour
- Once per day
- Only at process start
Your current utilization is also - technically - against the NTP Pool terms of use (I'd link to it, but I was warned not to post links as I'm a newly-registered user -- Suffice it to say you can find it on the "ntppool DOT org" web page ), as you should probably have created a vendor pool zone for fr24, and used that. Also, forcing every user to poll pools that are all over the world is silly, and often some of these pools may be small and not have as much capacity as larger pools. You are generating unnecessary load on the global pools, especially since normal NTP query backoff would settle around 1024 seconds (~17min), and you're polling more frequently than that (and to an unnecessarily large number of servers).
Sure, i t's smart to have a "sanity check" to see if the clock is correct, but other than at initial process startup, you really probably don't need to check more often than every hour, tops.
Checking to see if the system's clock is generally synched already (at least at process start) should be sufficient to avoid unnecessary traffic and unnecessary use of "all" the various global pools (which might traditionally not be expecting much traffic). Again, you really probably should not be specifying all of the various regional pools - just use the [0-3].pool.ntp.org hosts... but better yet getting a "vendor id" created for you, and using that.
Anyway, just trying to make sure the fr24 process is being as "friendly" as it should be, when dealing with the volunteer NTP pools
(n.b. I run several public NTP servers and have been contributing to the global NTP pools for a while now)
-Taner
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