Hi,

You shouldn't worry too much about your relay sometime appearing as overloaded. Sadly due to the ongoing network ddos, many relays show up that way. You shouldn't restart your relay daily, that would make everybody think it's not very stable, so you won't be able to get flags such as Stable, Guard or HSDir. In general to get a higher consensus weight, you need to have higher throughput, if your relay sometimes shows as overloaded, there is probably limited headroom for improvement.

I think the speed requirement was decided a very long time ago and wasn't ever updated. It's 0.5MByte/s (=4Mbps) for non exit relays, and half as much for exit ones. I guess not too many people are asking for tshirts, so having it that low isn't an issue for the people handling that. Running means first time, little over a dozen relays have not been restarted in the last 6 months. In general you should try to keep your relay be up to date, which necessarily imply a restart once in a while.

Best, trinity-1686a

On Sat, 18 Feb 2023 at 11:43, shruub via tor-relays tor-relays@lists.torproject.org wrote:

Hello,

so my relay regulary gets overloaded, for what I can only assume is an hardware issue, (which I can't upgrade rn) since I already applied the tor anti ddos scripts. It seems to be able to recover, however with a lower Consensus Weight. I also (stupidly) tried to have a cron restarting my tor daemon daily which also resulted in the latter. So I wonder, if there is any way to have a relay run more stable and I suppose with a somewhat higher consensus weight (I can only asssume making some further changes in advertising bandwidth etc.

My second question(s) is/are concerning the tor swag (I hope that's allowed to ask here). Firstly, what is the actual Speed requirement? In the tor ecosystem, every unit is MBs, and only on the swag site its KBs. But if my calculations are correct, 500KBs = 500000Bs = 0.5MBs which doesn't really make sence, imo(but I probably misscalculated somewhere). Secondly, does running mean it's uptime (aka Last Restarted) or the Time it was first seen?

Sorry for the wall of text for not much information, and thanks a lot in advance for your replies!

Best, shruub

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shruub via tor-relays wrote: I also (stupidly) tried to have a cron restarting

my tor daemon daily which also resulted in the latter. So I wonder, if there is any way to have a relay run more stable and I suppose with a somewhat higher consensus weight (I can only asssume making some further changes in advertising bandwidth etc.

Restarting it on demand is the worst thing you can do. Even if it's overloaded, it's much better to leave it running as overloaded and have stable uptime history than to restart it. Restarting it makes you lose flags, and it also might be the reason your consensus weight was lowered.

If you know the limits of your resources you are better of by using:

RelayBandwidthRate X MBytes RelayBandwidthBurst Y MBytes MaxAdvertisedBandwidth Z MBytes

(I prefer just using the first two without MaxAdvertisedBandwidth).

It's usually a good idea to have RelayBandwidthBurst much bigger than RelayBandwidthRate. Example X = 8 Y = 20, you will see constantly 8 MB/s via your machine. If that is OK for your CPU, RAM and bandwidth, otherwise use other values.

If you don't have enough bandwidth to overload your CPU/RAM you don't need to set this as Bandwidth authorities will assign your relay such a low weight that it won't reach the bottleneck.

My second question(s) is/are concerning the tor swag (I hope that's allowed to ask here). Firstly, what is the actual Speed requirement? In the tor ecosystem, every unit is MBs, and only on the swag site its KBs. But if my calculations are correct, 500KBs = 500000Bs = 0.5MBs which doesn't really make sence, imo(but I probably misscalculated somewhere). Secondly, does running mean it's uptime (aka Last Restarted) or the Time it was first seen?

You can set MBytes, GBytes, KBytes - don't need to compute yourself the Bs in order to reach a desired value of MBs.

As for what is the minimum required speed, there are mixt opinions here. There is _certainly_ a threshold where a relay becomes a problem rather than useful, when the resources spend to measure it, include it in the consensus and deliver its descriptors to clients overweight the speed it provides. There's not a value established yet for this as far as I know, but it certainly should be one. 500 KBs is too little for our days, IMO, at least 1 MB/s is even too little for mobile devices on 3G (we have 5G ready...).

You mean the `Running` flag? That means the relay is `running` $now where $now is the last time the majority of directory authorities voted that they can reach your relay (usually, last authority vote).

you also have `last restarted` and `first seen` separately for the other values you mentioned. `first seen` is only used for metrics, historic purposes while `last restarted` has some effect over flags (`HSDir`, `Guard`, `Stable`, etc.).

Thanks for running a relay!