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Hi relay and bridge operators,
want to help us design hardware capabilities of a Torouter device?
At the Florence hackfest I was asked for the typical number of RSA operations performed by a relay or bridge, say, per day. We're mostly interested in home-run relays and bridges on DSL lines and similar, because that's where Torouter devices will be deployed, too. So, Amunet and TorServers are out here. :)
Tor has a built-in feature to count PK operations. If one sends a USR1 signal to the tor process, it writes a line like this to its log file (though this line comes from a client):
Jul 10 18:31:22.904 [info] PK operations: 0 directory objects signed, 0 directory objects verified, 0 routerdescs signed, 2968 routerdescs verified, 216 onionskins encrypted, 0 onionskins decrypted, 30 client-side TLS handshakes, 0 server-side TLS handshakes, 0 rendezvous client operations, 0 rendezvous middle operations, 0 rendezvous server operations.
The number we're most interested in is "onionskins decrypted," but maybe there are other high numbers that are worth considering.
If you run a relay or bridge at home, run these four steps:
1. Make sure the relay or bridge is running for at least 24 hours (longer is fine, shorter may skew results)
2. Send the process a USR1 signal, e.g., kill -USR1 $pid
3. Look for the log line above
4. Reply to this email with a) the relay's or bridge's nickname, b) the first four hex characters of its fingerprint, c) the log time and timezone, d) the top-3 PK operations by numbers.
An example result could be:
gabelmoo F204 Jul 10 18:31:22.904 CEST 12345 onionskins decrypted 2968 routerdescs verified 216 onionskins encrypted
Thanks for your help!
Once I have some results, I'll look up relays and bridges in the descriptor archive and post results to this list.
Of course, if someone has more thoughts on measuring how many PK ops a relay or bridge does, please say so! :)
Thanks, Karsten