Hi,

Trey Nolen wrote:

I'm new to running a Tor relay and started one about a month ago. I've
got 50 Mbps dedicated to it and at first it climbed in traffic pretty
steadily until it got to around 25-30 Mbps being used. Since then, it
has declined steadily and is down to about 350 KBps now (yes, I'm
keeping the units straight).

My node is a single core VPS running 3.2GHz and with 1GB RAM.
Currently, top shows tor as using about 15% of the memory. When it was
churning out at the maximum rate it got to, the CPU was pretty
hammered. I was considering allocating another core, but there is no
need anymore as it is hovering around 7% usage.

The server is running on Ubuntu 16.04.3 and I'm running 0.3.1.7 tor.

Am I doing something wrong to result in the decrease in traffic? Any
advice is appreciated.

Trey Nolen

First of all, thanks for running a relay.

Based on my experience, what usually happens is that the provider of
your VPS observed during a period of time you used more than N mbps
constantly and all the time, so they capped your VPS at some KB/s limit.
There are performance monitoring scripts that could do this
automatically. A virtual private server shares the network card of the
host with the other VPSes on that host, so almost all providers do not
allow you to use it all by yourself all the time for long periods. You
can open a ticket upstream and they will confirm if this is the case or not.

Nothing you can do about this unfortunately, most providers do this,
even the ones they say they don't do it :) Only thing you can do is get
a dedicated server with guaranteed bandwidth, or try to convince them to
at least lift your the limitation for your VPS to 1mbps.