Re: [Sks-devel] keyserver.sincer.us needs more peers

[Phil Pennock]

On 2013-08-22 at 01:35 +0200, Petru Ghita wrote:
> keyserver.sincer.us needs more peers as it seems it's falling out of the
> pool due to not having enough connectivity and therefore missing keys.

You have plenty of peers, that's not the problem.

One reliable peer is enough to stay up-to-date.  More peers adds more
resiliency.  Even having just three is probably fine, but more than that
means you survive disappearing hosts, etc.

I *suspect* that this is fallout from the increased rate of key
generation post-PRISM combined with more folks using cron to trigger
stats regeneration every hour, instead of once a day.

When everyone had stats generated once per day, the standard deviation
(stddev, σ) of the key counts is broad enough to cover the distribution
of keys received during the course of the day.  As more people generate
stats hourly (by sending SIGUSR2 to sks) the stddev shrinks and folks
who only generate stats daily will, during the course of the day, appear
to be "behind" until their daily stats generation kicks in.

There are two fixes:

 1. pool maintenance allowing for an increased daily jitter, as a result
    of the increased rate of keys post-PRISM
 2. any operator who actually cares whether or not they're in the pool
    can send SIGUSR2 to their SKS every hour or so.

Honestly, when you drop out of the pool temporarily, you stop donating
free bandwidth to the public, it's not really a bad thing. ;)

-Phil