On 10/30/19 16:30, Mitar wrote:
Hi!
I have a gigabit connection and I am trying to utilize it as much as possible as a Tor relay. When I try various speed tests I get on the machine speeds close to gigabit, but when running Tor, I do not achieve anything close to it. I even started two Tor nodes on the same machine/connection, see here:
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/567E9785458C605E59202755C7489... https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/4CF9BAEB0DE6D7230D6B7DA0FF420...
The utilization of the machine is pretty low, top returns:
top - 20:27:33 up 4 days, 23:01, 1 user, load average: 0.32, 0.28, 0.23 Tasks: 167 total, 1 running, 97 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie %Cpu(s): 1.6 us, 0.6 sy, 0.0 ni, 97.3 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.5 si, 0.0 st KiB Mem : 3772912 total, 931336 free, 1574676 used, 1266900 buff/cache KiB Swap: 3900412 total, 3900412 free, 0 used. 1915568 avail Mem
In configuration I have:
RelayBandwidthRate 125 MB RelayBandwidthBurst 125 MB
Interesting is that it seems each Tor daemon on same machine runs always around 5 MiB/s, when I started the second one, it just added to it with another 5 MiB/s. So it is somewhere else where is the bottleneck?
What could I do to improve things here? To me it looks like more throughput should be possible?
Mitar
You've done everything correctly. Well ... setting RBR and RBB was probably unnecessary, but it's fine. The problem isn't on your end, if there's even a problem.
- In an ideal world you won't get more load than your fair share. Consider a hypothetically large Tor network with loads of high-capacity relays. Every relay may be capable of 1 Gbps but only see 10 Mbps, yet there is absolutely no problem.
- That's not to say the current network is anything like this. It's true exits are the bottleneck right now, but maybe you should expect more traffic as a non-exit.
- Relays get measured by bandwidth authorities and then load is balanced across the network based on their measurements. The whole bandwidth measuring system is a complex mess that produces confusing and unsatisfying results. Maybe you've gotten unlucky here.
- It's not ideal to be going full tilt all the time. You want to have some headroom for bursts without causing congestion. Obviously you aren't even close to that yet.
Thanks for running Tor relays. Sorry I don't have satisfying answers. Please stick with it and avoid worrying too much about the specific numbers :)