Hi Paul,
Paul Templeton:
Hi all,
Have been running a mirror for a couple of years and haven't had much time to dedicate to and exit node but have finally committed to it. Found a provider that doesn't seem to have a cap on data and it will cost me about five euros a month.
Question I have is two fold. First I find that atlas.torproject.org sometime says the node is down but its running and connected. Secondly how dose the bandwidth throttling work. I have set it to 300kbits with 500kbit burst but I can see the in/out traffic staying over 1mb for large periods of time and bursting to 7/8mb. Its not a problem just curios.
For bandwidth throttling, the option "BandwidthRate" applies to both incoming and outgoing traffic. That is, setting BandwidthRate to 300 Kbytes will limit incoming traffic to 300 kilobytes/s and outgoing traffic to 300 kilobytes/s. It's possible that whatever is measuring the in/out traffic is combining both these values (hence the 1megabit for the 500kbit value). The option "BandwidthBurst" behaves in a similar manner.
The manual explains each option in the torrc reasonably fully: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en (Alternatively, the command 'man tor' should display a virtual manual on the computer.)
I'm not sure why you'd be seeing the latter burst but I suspect the reason is due to an ill-configured torrc. It's probably worth checking the options again after reading the manual and reloading the Tor service.
Best, Duncan