Hello experts,
I have, from the same provider, two VPS with same specs (also same port speed of 200MBit/s, verified via speedtest-cli) - one in Germany, one in South Africa. Whilst the German one behaves as expected (two fast relays on it), the two relays in South Africa won't really get up to speed - barely traffic, and advertised bandwidth below 2MB/s .
In general, search for country:za on metrics does not really look too impressive. Do you have any idea about the reason, i.e. why, despite the VPS having the bandwidth, the relays do not get up to speed?
Thanks - C.
Carlo P. via tor-relays wrote:
Hello experts,
I have, from the same provider, two VPS with same specs (also same port speed of 200MBit/s, verified via speedtest-cli) - one in Germany, one in South Africa. Whilst the German one behaves as expected (two fast relays on it), the two relays in South Africa won't really get up to speed - barely traffic, and advertised bandwidth below 2MB/s .
In general, search for country:za on metrics does not really look too impressive. Do you have any idea about the reason, i.e. why, despite the VPS having the bandwidth, the relays do not get up to speed?
Thanks for running relays. Country diversity counts a lot in the Tor network.
Generally speaking, the network topology and Directory Authorities / Bandwidth authorities do not penalize or in any way limit specific countries (in current case South Africa). Not at all.
The reasons can be: - relay is new. you can search in the documentation the life cycle of a new relay, simply said, it takes some time until your relay gets measured at its peak capacity and it is used at its peak capacity. It's natural for it to start at a low advertised speed and see less traffic in the early stage of its life cycle.
- the VPS does not provide the advertised speed, the network port might have that speed but its either shared either not valid for internet destinations. The probability is smaller for this scenario. How did you test the VPS has that bandwidth available all the time and for general internet destinations?
Hi,
when reading that, this was my suspicion as well.
Ask your provider if the port is shared between other customers (common practice for virtual servers, for example I used to have one with a port speed of 100MbE, in the Czech Republic, however the port was sharted 1:3, so there were always 2 other customers on the same physical ethernet connection on the host system).
200 MBit/s sounds like it might be shared 1:5, if it's a QEMU/KVM virtual server.. you (the host or administrator) can easily bridge 5 different machines onto one 1 GbE physical ethernet adapter.
This is how I used to configure my VM machine on my colocated server:
<interface type='direct'> <mac address='52:54:00:ff:3b:1e'/> <source dev='eno2' mode='bridge'/> <model type='e1000'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x01' slot='0x00' >function='0x0'/> </interface>
Check the autonomous system ID for your datacenter, and it's peering as well.. a lot of hosts in SA just don't have the best connection.
Also, if your relay indeed is new, it might take a while for it to pick up speed.. for Guard relays, this can take longer than 8 weeks, for exit relays it is usually around 1-2 weeks.
On Tuesday, January 14th, 2025 at 4:59 PM, s7r via tor-relays tor-relays@lists.torproject.org wrote:
The VPS does not provide the advertised speed, the network port might have that speed but its either shared either not valid for internet destinations?
tor-relays@lists.torproject.org
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Carlo P. -
George Hartley -
s7r