[tor-relays] big spike in cpu usage

[Sebastian Hahn]

On Apr 8, 2013, at 7:52 AM, Moritz Bartl <moritz at torservers.net> wrote:
> On 07.04.2013 20:25, Andreas Krey wrote:
>> No, its not 'per second'. It is the amount of allowed traffic that can
>> be saved up while not hitting the BandwidthRate to be used up when the
>> BandwidthRate is exceeded. 
> 
> Wow. Thanks. All these years I completely misunderstood Tor's Burst
> settings. Sad too that nobody bothered to check our torrc and tell us. :(

Please don't make such assertions. People did check the torrc, and found
nothing to be wrong with it. For all I know and can tell from the source,
Tor's Burst settings indeed limit the amount of traffic you can send in
a single second. Setting it to higher than your line speed doesn't help
anything, and the bucket gets refilled to the burst anyway.

This is a comment from src/or/or.h:
>   uint64_t BandwidthRate; /**< How much bandwidth, on average, are we willing
>                            * to use in a second? */
>   uint64_t BandwidthBurst; /**< How much bandwidth, at maximum, are we willing
>                             * to use in a second? */

Now, it's entirely possible I'm missing something big here; or that the
code changed and now does something different; or that it used to do
something different, etc. Andreas, can you please explain more?

Thanks
Sebastian