On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 7:06 PM teor <teor@riseup.net> wrote:

Hi Ben,

> On 4 Apr 2019, at 10:58, Ben Riley <blades1000@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I've read over a couple of other threads regarding relays being slow, however, I can't figure out why mine is running as slow as it is.

Have you read our wiki page about slow relays?
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MyRelayIsSlow

What do you see when you follow the steps on that page?

Bandwidth rate: 1MiB/s

Bandwidth burst: 2MiB/s

Observed: 485.52 KiB/s

> I used to have a FAST flag and was getting a throughput of several hundred KB/sec on my relay. Now I can't remember if I upgraded TOR or just updated the OS, but I lost the flag. I figured that I'd changed something and would have to 'earn' it again after a few days, week and now months?

Normally, relays with slow or high-latency connections to North America and Europe won't get used much. Since you're on the other side of the globe, that's inevitable.

OK, no worries.

> According to NYX, my average is 6.4KB/sec. I did have the limit set to 1MB and 2MB burst for the last few months thinking that would be more than enough.
>
> This morning I changed those (via NYX) to 0 (default) 1GB/s and it looks like it's starting to climb.

Setting a limit faster than your connection makes Tor delay or drop packets. Since you already have high latency, drops or delays are going to make your measurements worse.

Maybe this is what I've done in the hope of opening up more bandwidth?

I have to admit I'm a little confused by the four options:

BandwidthRate - 1GB

BandwidthBurst - 1GB

RelayBandwidthRate - 1MB

RelayBandwidthBurst - 2 MB

I find that when I try and change these within NYX by hitting the right arrow and then editing them, that sometimes I go back out to the main screen, hit X twice to reset, that the settings go back. So I've gone in and edited the torrc file directly instead.

I've changed those lines to:

RelayBandwidthRate 500 KB # Throttle traffic to 100KB/s (800Kbps)
RelayBandwidthBurst 600 KB # But allow bursts up to 200KB/s (1600Kbps)

Now when I restarted NYX it says:

Bandwidth (limit: 500 KB/s, burst: 600 KB/s, measured: 13.0 B/s):

> My internet connection is on a home set up with a connection speed of about 97Mb, so plenty of speed available.

Just use the speed of your connection. (And if it's asymmetric, use the minimum of your upload and download.) Careful with the difference between megabits and megabytes per second!

So based on a connection of about 97Mb, which means I can usually peak out my download speeds at 11Mb/sec. Are those speeds above ok? I don't want to drown my connection, but happy to give it a couple of meg :)

> If you look at my previous reports on:https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/9F19251CEE17B1E05084898D164F0544CCB095DD there appears to be a massive drop off in speed during Feb 2019. I'm open to suggestion.

Looking at the 5 year graphs, your relay was used when the network was under heavy load for a few months in 2017/2018, and 2018/2019. Now the network isn't overloaded any more, clients don't need your relay as much, so it's back to its usual level.

OK, that's interesting. I didn't realise the network would change things that much.

> Additionally, I'm considering opening an exit port, but everyone seems to say that is a REALLY bad idea on a home set up. Plus I don't really know what I'm doing :)

Don't open an exit port at home, unless you like dealing with confused police officers.

If you have another IPv4 address, consider setting up a bridge relay.
(Bridges on the same IP as relays are easy to censor.)

If you don't, try setting up another relay instance on the same IPv4.
(There's a limit of two relays per IPv4 address.)

OK, I might leave the exit node alone then :)

Thanks

Ben.

T
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