Re: [Ntp] Costs of running NTP servers

[Miroslav Lichvar <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 12:46:06PM -0800, Hal Murray wrote:
> What are the costs of running a high traffic NTP server?  Or collection of 
> servers?  Something on the scale of NIST or PTB?

1M/s of plain NTP is about 230 TB/month in one direction. If it
was NTS-NTP with 1 cookie using AES-SIV-CMAC, it would be about 700
TB/month.

For an individual at home or an ordinary company using cheap hardware
and not caring much about availability and reliability (using a single
server), the traffic cost would probably be the most expensive part of
the operation.

I'd not expect NIST to care much about traffic. I suspect the issue
they have with NTS is not the computation cost, but the complexity of
implementation. A plain NTP server is trivial. It can be implemented
from scratch in an hour. NTS with its dependency on TLS is much more
work. NIST runs their own NTP implementation and I guess they for some
reason cannot or don't want to switch to an existing implementation.

-- 
Miroslav Lichvar