On Sat, 3 Nov 2018 13:26:17 -0500 Scott Ashcraft scott@ashcraft.com wrote:

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/EC0ABA811E4EB33DAD8BC8B7037D8...

I honestly have no idea. I am running on Google Fiber and have set:

RelayBandwidthRate 52000 KBytes RelayBandwidthBurst 104000 KBytes

The spike in January is when I switched out some bad equipment. There were a couple of outages in late Feb/Mar for a few hours each, and then some (usually monthly) restarts since. I also at one point tried to add a Family Member which I have since removed. Other than that, there haven't been any changes to my setup. Aside from the addition, then removal of the family member, my torrc configuration hasn't changed since starting over a year ago.

Any thoughts? I'd like to be more useful to the community,

What you can do right off the bat, is to run a second Tor instance on the same IP address (of course on a different port). You can run two per IP, and it is most often a no-brainer to do so. I would expect it to get around the same 4-5 MB/sec usage over time -- with little to no impact on speeds of the first one.

As for why the bandwidth drops off, maybe you just don't get a lot of download or upload speed, despite what your plan advertised (it's usually "up to" anyways). Or the ISP shapes weird ports and protocols, or maybe even Tor, to a lower speed specifically. Try choosing some standard and commonly used for "encrypted data" port for the 2nd instance, such as 443/993/995/etc.

Also if you find that you don't reach the RelayBandwidthRate/Burst by a long shot, it's better to just comment them out entirely, I think it saves some CPU time on useless housekeeping.