Nyx reported speed - tor-relays

8 Jan 2018


      I'm not sure if reporting is off or something isn't configured right or whatever it could be, but when running nyx, it is telling me that the measured rate is 229.0 B/s which to me, sounds ridiculously slow. Where is it getting the measured rate from? Is it a calculation on how much data is passing in a given time or some sort of speed test from another relay or where? While I've used Tor off and on for several years, I never ran a relay until now and I'm still not certain on several aspects, though I keep digging to make sure I can supply the best exit relays I can. (I currently host 2 exit relays and hope to bring up 3 more in the near future if I can find hardware to run them on. Though I may make one a bridge.)
I have some spare internet connections that are provided to us that are 25/5 connections. I configured torrc with a 500KB/s limit with 600KB/s bursting as this should work nicely to use ~4Mbps of the 5Mbps that the connection supports and allows me some bandwidth to be able to connect to the machines for monitoring and troubleshooting as well as more than enough bandwidth for downloading updates and such.
The line in nyx that I'm referring to is:
Bandwidth (limit: 500 KB/s, burst: 600 KB/s, measured: 229.0 B/s):
Where is it getting that 229.0 B/s rate and is there anything I can do to get it closer to the 500KB/s I am trying to share.
Granted, I am using a Linksys e1200 and Belkin something-or-other that I can't remember off the top of my head running DD-WRT as routers in front of the servers. (I've pondered removing the router and just connecting the server directly to the internet and relying on pf for my firewalling, but I can't do that at the one location as I also have a couple other things connected to it. Both routers are higher end consumer routers with 32MB of RAM and has 32768 for maximum ports. (Currently just under 3000 active IP connections as I'm typing this e-mail.) I might just try this on my one exit to see if this is the bottleneck I'm hitting or if there's something else affecting it.
When I had first put this in place, I was using an older Netgear ProVPN router of some sort, but I swapped it out due to it flagging NTP traffic as unknown even though my server was initiating the NTP requests. But I was maintaining 200KB/s+ connections fairly consistently. It now ranges all over the place and I'm not sure if that's an issue on my end or just part of the lifecycle of a relay.
I just recently rebooted the machine this happened to pop up in the nyx log window as I was looking at this:
12:33:09 [NOTICE] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 4 days 23:59 hours, with 1928 circuits open. I've sent 37.89 GB and received 37.00 GB.
To me, that seems a too low, but I've not sat down to do the math and maybe that's a good statistic for 5 days at 4Mbps.
I'd appreciate any tips and pointers you can send my way. And if the consumer routers are the issue, I can move my one exit relay to one of the other connections I have and not use it at the location (or just run one that's slower) where I do use this backup internet connection. (It's handy to have a network that's not part of our internal network for testing.)
Thanks for sticking with me through this whole e-mail and I apologize for rambling and jumping around a bit. I'm sure I left out some stuff and didn't clarify something else or something wasn't clear, so if you need more information, just ask.
Thank you,
John
Penn Cambria School District
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