Dear Neel,

I am running a middle relay on what Verizon sold us as "Business Class" service, meaning upload/download speeds are the same. I just checked my speednet test and got 57 mbps download and 68mbps upload, which seems suspiciously close to your 80mbps. The verizon Actionteck MI424RW, ordinary router which came from Verizon, has handled up to 4500 connections just fine in the past. Now with the new Dos mitigation in the tor relay, it handles more like half that. (about 2300 right now)

I suspect our services are the same, and my guess is that you are maxed out on actual bandwidth of the Verizon service.

I have been too afraid to run an exit on Verizon, and used to adjust my max bandwidth so as to keep the throughput at about 1TB/month. Do let us know how you do with an exit relay.

--Torix

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Sunday, February 17, 2019 11:57 PM, Roman Mamedov rm@romanrm.net wrote:

On Sun, 17 Feb 2019 21:54:12 -0500 Neel Chauhan neel@neelc.org wrote:

...

I have a Tor relay "NeelTorRelay2": https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/D5B8C38539C509380767D4DE20DE8... This relay is hosted on a 300 mbps Verizon FiOS (FTTH/GPON) connection. My server is a HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 (quad-core AMD X3421 variant) running FreeBSD, and my router is a Linksys WRT1900AC running OpenWrt.

Do you have both 300 Mbit download AND upload speed? Did you verify that you actually get that (e.g. on speedtest.net)? GPON typically has much lower speeds in the upload direction. Your Tor bandwidth will be lower of the two.

---

With respect, Roman

tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

Hi Roger,

The very short answer is that this could all be normal.

You might find some of the ideas in this wiki page useful: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MyRelayIsSlow

Among the most important points:

• It's actually bad for the network for relays to be hitting their

capacity -- since it means user traffic is intentionally delayed at that relay.

Good to know.

I know my relay can't hit 100% of its capacity 24/7. I want the "consensus weight" and the "advertised bandwidth" to see my bandwidth.

• Exit relays tend to attract as much traffic as they can provide,

since exit capacity is scarce in the network right now. But for non-exit relays, you shouldn't be surprised if they don't fill their available bandwidth. The traffic your relay receives has to do with how the load balancing works, and actual total traffic from clients varies over time.

Understood.

• The "torflow" bandwidth authority measurement system is pretty

clearly broken, in that it measures relays badly. This is known, and we've been working to fix it, but "how come I have this weird bandwidth weight" is a common question over the past few years. :(

Makes sense. I hope torflow gets replaced soon.

So in summary, it might be that something on your side is unnecessarily limiting your relay performance, but it could also just be that the "luck of the draw" from the load balancing system is what gave you this load.

I thought of many reasons: my router, Verizon's backbone, Verizon's FiOS edge network, or just Tor's crappy load balancing system (which I hopes gets fixed soon).

If you want to use more of your bandwidth, consider running two relays as somebody suggested in this thread. Or just sit back and be happy at your nice relay contribution. :)

I set up another relay to increase my bandwidth. If that doesn't help, I will look into replacing my WRT1900AC with a pfSense or Ubiquiti box.

(Another option is that you could open up your exit policy, but that's probably a poor idea for a relay running at home.)

I probably won't. Aside from the obvious reasons, I won't run an exit from home because:

* I would get blacklisted from too many websites * Most ISPs don't want to give you you more than one IPv4 address to separate Tor traffic from everything else unless you go business class * Verizon would probably notice my "exit" relay from abuse complaints and then would say "you can't do this on FiOS" unless I go business class

I run an exit from a dedicated server (not a OVH/Online.net/Scaleway/Hetzner, but one from a host called GTHost).

Thanks! --Roger

You're welcome.

-Neel

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