First (positive) experiences with a Tor Relay on Raspberry Pi3

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Hi, I've just moved my Tor relay installation from my alix1.c embedded system (500Mhz CPU with 256Mb ram) which was able to offer only 4Mbps (100% CPU utilization) to a new Raspberry Pi3 (quad-core 1.2Ghz 64-bit cpu with 1 GB ram). Some days ago I've seen some messages on the ML about Pi2 performance (if I remember well) and I'd like to share my first experiences with Pi3. I have only 20Mbps connection in the uplink direction, so I'm offering about 15Mbps for Tor relay and I've just seen that it is able to offer 14Mbps with 40% of a single core utilization.. In conclusion, I think that a single relay on Pi3 can offer about 30-40 Mbps, and if you run 4 tor relays on the same Pi3 you can offer more than 100Mbps which is definitely not bad for such a small system. The only drawback is that you need to find a good way for keeping it cold, since after 1 hour of 1 core at 100% I've reached about 70°C with heatsinks on the CPU. I just wanted to share my experience with you, hope you find it interesting :) Have a nice week Fr33d0m4All - -- _____________________________________________________________ PGP Key: 0DA8 7293 D561 3AEE A3C0 7F63 101F 316A F30E ECB4 IRC Nick: fr33d0m4all (OFTC & Freenode) _____________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJXCpLUAAoJEBAfMWrzDuy0KpQQAKG1Su24A3O1keFdPGk2zdzw lwEk+pSvRzfoHfmocv5ia9PQ8ZtBws3QfaxfZOYIA0DxdKVK7Rcs+r0ekL6VtAdp y3HU3SlAoCxFDsHycsPhuXZPmQqU/+OAS0lrzo2KrKk/lN/K+b2YYzLfJ+9SWzE1 kg4dcCnWfQrMsLLK72R9qIjSmDsXDGzzNRq0qM3nDjDmE5GPmMJajSbWsHP12v/q BnA786RdB/CDiFVifGPYsKEuughpJ1ryVSRm3LdmTdIjZ+u/sxz0/TQrmj7idgdr TenFk4rf0NbiLU/7sruNJNYPFHvUMUOC8Xu7wBJU2LTF/8fcjYOaQp2UWch4aGQa nM4tMetvhEmoGxcEmJSsi2CHdLkMZ8G67gfufb7Gmsmd59q0KvRQktPxqnJ0GJIs 20x2PX2qzXX7P4mKL8nO0aX32OP+1xScuSH/85Lu6Nnh1jL+T81QPjk/CUHB86ho gbuGt154KEnMoKx+w3aXrzSKVH5kRMgWhIcbRt/xELWprx2zsxGM+gIOCdLQ/vXi PugDblYL8sa8Uds6cz0fjNsuCBI19X0NlnmGFAbU9qOHEhUzYpuF4VlH7sOkL0n2 HWkJTSIjizjZCS0PDPeaqj3lOtoFJiYcAxef+HnGEI/5dameIBB/MDJyOrf+oRfL 1kNo6Zd5KqJesnljCac5 =pk6h -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:52:20 +0000 fr33d0m4all <fr33d0m4all@riseup.net> wrote:
I've just moved my Tor relay installation from my alix1.c embedded system (500Mhz CPU with 256Mb ram) which was able to offer only 4Mbps (100% CPU utilization) to a new Raspberry Pi3 (quad-core 1.2Ghz 64-bit cpu with 1 GB ram). Some days ago I've seen some messages on the ML about Pi2 performance (if I remember well) and I'd like to share my first experiences with Pi3. I have only 20Mbps connection in the uplink direction, so I'm offering about 15Mbps for Tor relay and I've just seen that it is able to offer 14Mbps with 40% of a single core utilization.. In conclusion, I think that a single relay on Pi3 can offer about 30-40 Mbps, and if you run 4 tor relays on the same Pi3 you can offer more than 100Mbps which is definitely not bad for such a small system. The only drawback is that you need to find a good way for keeping it cold, since after 1 hour of 1 core at 100% I've reached about 70°C with heatsinks on the CPU.
If you build tor against OpenSSL 1.1 on that target you will get a massive increase in performance due to support for the ARMv8 hardware AES acceleration. This requires 0.2.8.x from the maint-028 branch (or master if you're brave) since I recently fixed tor (again) to compile with this version of the library, but the changes will be in the next 0.2.8 release candidate. Regards, -- Yawning Angel

On 10/04/2016 20:28, Yawning Angel wrote:
On Sun, 10 Apr 2016 17:52:20 +0000 fr33d0m4all <fr33d0m4all@riseup.net> wrote:
I've just moved my Tor relay installation from my alix1.c embedded system (500Mhz CPU with 256Mb ram) which was able to offer only 4Mbps (100% CPU utilization) to a new Raspberry Pi3 (quad-core 1.2Ghz 64-bit cpu with 1 GB ram). Some days ago I've seen some messages on the ML about Pi2 performance (if I remember well) and I'd like to share my first experiences with Pi3. I have only 20Mbps connection in the uplink direction, so I'm offering about 15Mbps for Tor relay and I've just seen that it is able to offer 14Mbps with 40% of a single core utilization.. In conclusion, I think that a single relay on Pi3 can offer about 30-40 Mbps, and if you run 4 tor relays on the same Pi3 you can offer more than 100Mbps which is definitely not bad for such a small system. The only drawback is that you need to find a good way for keeping it cold, since after 1 hour of 1 core at 100% I've reached about 70°C with heatsinks on the CPU. If you build tor against OpenSSL 1.1 on that target you will get a massive increase in performance due to support for the ARMv8 hardware AES acceleration.
This requires 0.2.8.x from the maint-028 branch (or master if you're brave) since I recently fixed tor (again) to compile with this version of the library, but the changes will be in the next 0.2.8 release candidate.
Regards,
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To follow up on your experience I am currently running a relay from a rasp3 with a bandwidth limit of 24 Mb/s. I am using the tor package from raspbian (Tor 0.2.5.12). arm currently gives me the following informations: cpu: usually between 20.0% and 40% mem: 160 MB (17.3%) for a current average down and up of 35.3 Mb/sec and 36.1 Mb/sec (due to my high burst rating I suppose) The 15 mins load average of the raspy (which mostly runs tor) is 0.38. It may be biased by me running arm, which seems rather CPU intensive, to look things up for a while. I am not monitoring the temperature. The CPU seems a little hot to the touch, but not overly so. The rasp has an uptime of 14 days. All in all it seems to handle the load rather well! Regards,
participants (3)
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fr33d0m4all
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Tom Jorquera
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Yawning Angel