Thanks for writing to us.
Thanks for the answers.
This is a question that gets asked a lot: "Many people set up new fast relays and then wonder why their bandwidth is not fully loaded instantly…" https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay
Maybe this is correct in many cases. But definitely not in all of them.
For example, this line: "once the bwauths have measured you and the directory authorities lift the 20KB cap, you'll attract more and more traffic" Events can go other way: bwauths will assign lower weight, and relay will be getting less and less traffic.
It can take a week or two for the bandwidth authorities to measure a relay.
Relay, which hit the problem, can be in underpowered state for months.
I'm not sure if this is a problem. And I'm not sure how many relays it impacts.
Hundreds, I guess.
Here is some examples:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/9FC2673BB2704C2AAB851F8334938565DF1D08... Now used bandwidth: 1 KiB/s Advertised Bandwidth: 131.38 KiB/s Top used bandwidth: 250 KiB/s Bandwidth rate: 4000 KiB/s
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/B918EB3FA4D03A4F9F632AA17F217A6C04044E... Now used bandwidth: 1 KiB/s Advertised Bandwidth: 82.65 KiB/s Top used bandwidth: 245 KiB/s Bandwidth rate: 800 KiB/s
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/DF1C6C645C5854780778A3E81D12F2A8FF6574... Now used bandwidth: 1 KiB/s Advertised Bandwidth: 62.29 KiB/s Top used bandwidth: 7 KiB/s Bandwidth rate: 3000 KiB/s
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/E2AF5879F39FF40DF8994E9B8FAEAB2518AEEB... Now used bandwidth: 1 KiB/s Advertised Bandwidth: 70.94 KiB/s Top used bandwidth: 916 KiB/s Bandwidth rate: 1000 KiB/s
As you can see, most of them can handle a lot more traffic: 50x-4000x. Also don't see why they can have high latency. Good relays, on my opinion.
But we know there is a bias in Tor's measurements towards North America and Europe, because that's where most of the measurements are made from:
No, this have no impact in this case.
I have launched my own instance of BwAuthority and I see, that measured "filt_bw" values are pretty close to "Advertised Bandwidth":
node_id=$9FC2673BB2704C2AAB851F8334938565DF1D0819 nick=qq strm_bw=52732 filt_bw=77967 circ_fail_rate=0.0 desc_bw=134537 ns_bw=13000 node_id=$9FC2673BB2704C2AAB851F8334938565DF1D0819 nick=qq strm_bw=61278 filt_bw=70430 circ_fail_rate=0.0 desc_bw=85495 ns_bw=13000 node_id=$B918EB3FA4D03A4F9F632AA17F217A6C04044EF7 nick=TranTor strm_bw=40485 filt_bw=47052 circ_fail_rate=0.0 desc_bw=84635 ns_bw=12000
The problem is on the next step, I think.
The result has revealed some anomalies: https://s8.hostingkartinok.com/uploads/images/2017/06/fed1cf8b57fc027223c8ea... First, and most important, - a lot of relays have bandwidth estimate in range 0-50: 1082 of them.
I don't know what each axis is on this graph.
x is KiB/s, y is count (yellow bars are for "Advertised Bandwidth", blue - for "Consensus Weight", grey mean both values)
20 is the default, 50 is the maximum for a relay's self-test. If a relay isn't measured, or measures very low, it usually gets a figure in this range.
I have excluded non-measured relays from this histogram.
Second - there are incorrect estimates for popular bandwidths of 5, 10 and 20 MBits.
I don't understand what you mean here. The advertised bandwidth is in kilobytes per second, and the consensus weight is dimensionless (but scaled from kilobytes per second).
Can you point out the lines you mean?
Look at the yellow spike at x = ~1200. Low blue bars at the same point means that "Consensus Weight" model did not take into account that there are many 1200 KiB/s nodes on the network, which will result in theirs underload.
-- Vort