Hi Roger,
The very short answer is that this could all be normal.
You might find some of the ideas in this wiki page useful: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MyRelayIsSlow
Among the most important points:
- It's actually bad for the network for relays to be hitting their
capacity -- since it means user traffic is intentionally delayed at that relay.
Good to know.
I know my relay can't hit 100% of its capacity 24/7. I want the "consensus weight" and the "advertised bandwidth" to see my bandwidth.
- Exit relays tend to attract as much traffic as they can provide,
since exit capacity is scarce in the network right now. But for non-exit relays, you shouldn't be surprised if they don't fill their available bandwidth. The traffic your relay receives has to do with how the load balancing works, and actual total traffic from clients varies over time.
Understood.
- The "torflow" bandwidth authority measurement system is pretty
clearly broken, in that it measures relays badly. This is known, and we've been working to fix it, but "how come I have this weird bandwidth weight" is a common question over the past few years. :(
Makes sense. I hope torflow gets replaced soon.
So in summary, it might be that something on your side is unnecessarily limiting your relay performance, but it could also just be that the "luck of the draw" from the load balancing system is what gave you this load.
I thought of many reasons: my router, Verizon's backbone, Verizon's FiOS edge network, or just Tor's crappy load balancing system (which I hopes gets fixed soon).
If you want to use more of your bandwidth, consider running two relays as somebody suggested in this thread. Or just sit back and be happy at your nice relay contribution. :)
I set up another relay to increase my bandwidth. If that doesn't help, I will look into replacing my WRT1900AC with a pfSense or Ubiquiti box.
(Another option is that you could open up your exit policy, but that's probably a poor idea for a relay running at home.)
I probably won't. Aside from the obvious reasons, I won't run an exit from home because:
* I would get blacklisted from too many websites * Most ISPs don't want to give you you more than one IPv4 address to separate Tor traffic from everything else unless you go business class * Verizon would probably notice my "exit" relay from abuse complaints and then would say "you can't do this on FiOS" unless I go business class
I run an exit from a dedicated server (not a OVH/Online.net/Scaleway/Hetzner, but one from a host called GTHost).
Thanks! --Roger
You're welcome.
-Neel
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