On 09/07/16 11:54, Farid Joubbi wrote:
I had not thought of the diversity that way.
There's a host of diversity issues with Tor to cover, but I tend to think OS diversity is one of the more critical.
These are some reports we generate at TDP:
https://torbsd.github.io/dirty-stats.html
Thanks for pointing it out.
I am still interested in the subject though, if anyone has any specific examples of some kind of general rules of why one OS usually performs better than some other OS as a tor relay...
There's lots of factors to consider once one is using similar hardware, the same bandwidth and pipes, etc.
The ultimate difficulty in doing a test comparison is creating identical scenarios. Tor is a more or less random anonymity routing network, which breaks any notion of repeatability.
This piece makes a general case pretty clearly:
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2732268
However, the FreeBSD networking stack is known to be extremely fast and optimized.
OpenBSD is built to be secure by default, so many default knobs are aimed at keeping a live system secure. The most obvious parameter to adjust is kern.maxfiles in the sysctls.
Certainly both are underrepresented in the Tor public network... .but we're working on it. . .
I realize that I might not get any good answers since my question is kind of broad and unspecific.
Clearly you are asking the right questions, which is what's critical IMHO.
Not directing to the OP, but I also strongly think one should stick with the OS they are most comfortable in administering, regardless of diversity questions. If someone's never used a Unix-like system before, and can't manage to edit a file with vi(1), start elsewhere :)
g