Hi Matt,
Tor indeed does not use more than one core for most of its operations, effectively limiting throughput to ~100MBps per Tor process on a non-AES-NI machine.
A CPU with AES-NI support can do up to 300-400MBps per Tor process.
You will have to run multiple Tor processes.
See https://www.torservers.net/wiki/setup/server#multiple_tor_processes for a handy initscript.
On 26.02.2013 14:46, Matt Joyce wrote:
I am wondering if anyone with experience in this area could advise me some on recommended specifications for a 1Gbps exit I think my latest once needs a package upgrade to handle it, currently seems stuck at around 100Mbps worth of traffic. Currently it has access to 3 v cores @1.33Ghz and 1GB of RAM and I think the latter might be becoming the limit instead now I had thought it was the CPU when it had just the one core but that alone hasn't helped.
I am not entirely sure if tor is infact using the other cores though watching with top it is sitting at 100 or a fraction over like 104% or so. MaxCPU's is set in torrc to 4 as the OS sees 4 virtual cores but is capped to 300% by the hypervisor perhaps it should be set to 3 not sure if there is any benefit in setting to 4 I have limited experience with virtual servers but unfortunately a fully dedicated server for tor is financially out of my budget at the moment.
Also, just to confirm while I'm aware it's very possible that the limitation could be bandwidth given it shares with the other VPS'es on the host I don't believe that was the case, I pulled a backup from there to another server of mine on a different AS and continent and it transferred at 250Mbps while tor was running at 100Mbps the entire time, so unless the contention is over the download which seems less likely for a server I think we should be able to get a good 300Mbps of exit capacity out of this possibly more.
So can anyone can advise on recommended CPU, RAM have to consider budget but will try and meet them, also if there are any settings I should check in torrc?
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