Hi Gary,

thanks for the warm welcome.

I am currently not performing any load-balancing between my different Tor relays or my physical/virtual servers. Having thought about it a bit, I can only see this make sense if you intend to offer .onion services. I don't. Maybe I missed something?

I have some bare-metal servers that run multiple instances of Tor to provide multiple relays each and I have some virtual instances (KVM, VMWare) that run a single instance of Tor, providing one relay each. These are hosted at different providers all over the world (see simplified attached graphic).

As each relay is measured by the Tor network individually, is reachable independently and is not "critical" to the rest of the network, I don't see how load-balancing them could give me or the users of Tor a sizable benefit - as long as I am not running any hidden services. If one relay goes down, there is already an automatic switch-over to a different relay in the network. If one relay is overloaded, this is also detected and (presumably) it will be used less in the future.

What part do you intent to load-balance and to what outcome?

Best Regards,
Kristian


Dec 12, 2021, 15:42 by tor-relays@lists.torproject.org:
Welcome to tor-relays, Kristian. It's nice to meet a fellow Tor Farmer. It sounds like you are fairly seasoned with quite an extensive deployment of Tor Relays.

Are you performing any loadbalancing with Tor Nodes or are they Individually, Distributed Tor Relays?

I have a Single Tor Relay comprised of a number of Tor Nodes. I'm always interested in knowledge sharing related to Tor Loadbalancing.

What are your thoughts on the Pros & Cons of dedicating resources to a Single, Loadbalanced Tor Relay vs Many, Unloadbalanced Tor Relays by a Tor Operator? Perhaps, a Hybrid approach?

I look forward to hear more of your Tor farming practices.

Respectfully,


Gary
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On Sunday, December 12, 2021, 1:31:09 AM PST, abuse--- via tor-relays <tor-relays@lists.torproject.org> wrote:


Hello Tor relay operators,

I joined this mail list recently and wanted to take the opportunity to shortly introduce myself.
My name is Kristian, I am based in Europe, and I operate all nodes behind the domain lokodlare.com. “Lökodlare” is Swedish for “onion farmers”, which is pretty much what I do.

My goal is to contribute to the Tor network by providing a couple of high-bandwidth nodes all over the globe, preferably at less common providers and/or in niche countries. I will focus on Middle and Guard relays, though I will throw some exits into the mix every now and then with a very reduced exit policy.

I currently operate 90+ relays and bridges with a theoretical bandwidth capacity of roughly 25 Gbit/s. As a snapshot, those nodes handled around 280 TB of Tor-related traffic in the past 24 hours.

I am looking forward to talk/discuss with all of you in the future.

Thanks, have a great Sunday,
Kristian
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