network-health

network-health@lists.torproject.org

August 2020

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West Coast US Tor Relays Slow - Low Consensus Weight versus East Coast
by Neel Chauhan 06 Aug '20

06 Aug '20

Hi network-health@/tor-relays@ mailing lists, I noticed one thing: Tor relays on the West Coast US (and Canada) are generally slower than those on say the East Coast and in Europe. I moved to the West Coast this January, but this was not an issue in the past when looking at dedicated servers I had from the West Coast prior to this year. These are two middle relay instances on an Gigabit FTTH connection (Wave G in Redmond, WA): https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/B0F9BA27944FA59E3B1A182208FF… https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/DB710B14D7329B7289CFCC547F48… The Consensus Weight often is slower than the Advertised Bandwidth, and isn't ramping up despite having lots of bandwidth. I set RelayBandwidthRate to about 500 Mbps on each instance. This isn't just a Wave G problem, this affects almost every relay in the West Coast including other Gigabit ISPs such as AT&T (AS7018) and Sonic (AS46375), as well as hosting companies and colocation facilities. For instance, my Los Angeles-based Exit relays at Psychz Networks (AS40676) show this issue (however they are new): https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/156AAC3FAD1ACC8906316519DCB4… https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A69CEB30328B1E85C6B167FECAF2… Even Emerald Onion has this issue: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/09DCA3360179C6C8A5A20DDDE1C5… What is causing this issue and is there a solution? Is it backbone congestion due to COVID-19? The high load on dirauths? sbws regressions? Can I help fix this issue? I am a Core Tor contributor and am open to also working on sbws. Is there a way to optimize my relays (they run FreeBSD). -Neel === https://www.neelc.org/

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