Hello together,
today I apparently discovered an interesting feature of Tor I wasn't
aware of:
I'm running two relays at a large provider's data center having
20TB/month free outgoing traffic for each relay. However, this quota is
often exhausted before the end of a month. In order to provide the Tor
project with some bandwidth all the time, I configured "AccountingMax 20
TB" and "AccountingStart month 1 00:00" and, for the last few months, I
used to switch off one of the relays on the first of a month and turn it
on again a few days after the beginning of the month, so that one of the
two relays is running all the time. I also connected the two relays
using the "MyFamily" flag.
Until last month, each of the relays simply continued to run after the
end of the month. Today, however, I wondered why one of the relays shut
itself down apparently which did not change after a restart. A look into
/var/log/tor/notices.log provided the following entries:
Oct 01 16:58:29.000 [notice] Configured hibernation. This interval
began at 2023-10-01 00:00:00; the scheduled wake-up time is 2023-10-05
06:06:25; we expect to exhaust our quota for this interval around
2023-10-29 04:23:25; the next interval begins at 2023-11-01 00:00:00
(all times local)
[...]
Oct 01 16:58:49.000 [notice] Commencing hibernation. We will wake up at
2023-10-05 06:06:25 local time.
Oct 01 16:58:49.000 [notice] Going dormant. Blowing away remaining
connections.
So apparently Tor learned from my behavior and calculated itself when to
turn itself off and on again in order to use as much quota as possible
based on the bandwidth used and/or some other metrics so I don't have to
do this manually in future?
Kind regards
telekobold
