On Fri, 04 Jan 2013 13:36:20 +0000, mick wrote: ...
But this morning I noticed that the new server had stopped and tor says in it's log "Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests! Please consider using the MaxAdvertisedBandwidth config option or choosing a m ore restricted exit policy."
I've never had the luxury of encountering this problem before,
I had. As it happened on a node with 50KB/s advertised bandwidth, I assume that it's not actually the bandwidth, but a (mostly) unrelated factor. My suspicion is that this happens when you happen to become a crucial position for a hidden service. (Or some rogue nodes are doing something strange.)
The problem is simply that the many circuit creation requests cause a lot of CPU to be used, and the node can't keep up with that. MaxAdvertisedBandwidth only very indirectly influences that.
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The manual entry for "MaxAdvertisedBandwidth" is not particularly clear because it does not specify whether the bytes|KB|MB|GB is per second or a maximum for some other period.
It isn't; one may deduce from the units of the referenced BandwidthRate that MaxAdvertisedBandwidth is also per seconds.
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So my question is, what can colleages recommend as a suitable maximum rate which will allow my node to provide maximum utility to the tor network without falling over?
As far as I can tell, tor is pretty much self-scaling in that regard, but I only have nodes with a relatively low BandwidthRate (500k).
Do you have an explicit BandwidthRate set?
Andreas