Hi,

we're currently looking forward to expand our contribution to the Tor network and as a mathematically fascinated person, I'm pretty much into statistical data from https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html at the moment and implication on Accounting/Bandwidthrate configuration opportunities for our Tor relays to utilize them at maximum efficiency, i.e. I'd like to start a discussion with other relay operators.

That said, I noticed that the BW advertised into the network (bwadv) vs the BW actually put through the network (bwhist) is at a 1.544945508 ratio throughout the whole Tor network. I.e. a relay configured to provide 500 GiB of traffic/mo would put through (respectively actually is putting through right now) "just" 323.63601 GiB traffic/mo on average.

Now, my questions (respectively thoughts for discussion) would be:

1. What would you assume to be the reason for it? I mean this is a calculated average through 3117 relays and thus I'd say rather meaningful, i.e. the largest possible "sample" (i.e. it isn't just a few relays behaving like so). Also, looking at one of our own two test relays that is *definitely* running 24/7 - vks24949, it pretty much shows the same figures. Vnstat estimates 342.23 GiB traffic/mo for September 12 and the relay actually is configured to provide 500 GiB traffic/mo with daily accounting set up (1.461005756 ratio vs 1.544945508 ratio calculated from *.csv provided at https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html for the whole Tor network).

2. As a result of all that, I currently come to the conclusion that it could be a good practice to actually configure 1.544945508 times the traffic for both the daily accountingmax + the actual relaybandwidthrate in KiB/s to *really* utilize the BW provided by sponsors (in our very case) to the full potential.

I'm looking forward to your input on this. Thanks in advance, Thomas