Michael McConville wrote:
Roman Mamedov wrote:
On Thu, 18 Aug 2016 10:40:00 -0600 Michael McConville mmcco@mykolab.com wrote:
Zack Weinberg wrote:
Has anyone had any experience running *exit* nodes on Raspberry Pi-grade hardware, or slightly beefier? We are thinking of replacing the old, bulky, power-hungry machine currently running exit 78C7C299DB4C4BD119A22B87B57D5AF5F3741A79 with something on that level. It only has to hit 10Mbps.
There's only one way to find out, but I suspect an RPi would be too weak for the job. Exits use more CPU because they manage far more TCP/UDP connections than a non-exit relay. I've seen significant CPU usage (maybe even CPU saturation) on a cheap Intel Core Duo moving about 3-5 MB/s.
Raspberry Pi 3 should do fine, not to mention some of the more powerful boards -- there are now up to 8-core, up to 1.7 GHz ones. Even though the core number won't help you too much, you shouldn't underestimate what a modern 64-bit ARM can do. Especially if the task at hand is mere 10 Mbps.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong. However, remember that while 10 Mbps doesn't sound like a lot, it can imply 7,000+ open connections. That can stress the kernel and the CPU cache.
I forgot to mention all the crypto required, too. These boards don't have crypto accelerators, so that's a big cost.