[tor-relays] hardware

[Andy Isaacson]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 08:46:20PM +0200, Andreas Fink wrote:
> can someone give me hints on what hardware would be best suited to run
> big fat tor exit nodes connected with multiple 1gbps or 10gps links?
> We are considering putting some fat boxes near major internet
> exchanges of the world.

Modern Xeon, AES-NI is helpful, HT is not very helpful (but not hurtful
either), higher clock rate is more helpful than more cores.  4GB of RAM
per core, you can probably get away with 2GB/core but why skimp.
Noisetor uses most of a 4-core X3350 2.6 GHz to push ~500 Mbps
symmetric.  That's without AES-NI, so I'd expect a quadcore 2.5 GHz
AES-NI to be able to fill a 1Gbps pipe.

AMD doesn't seem to make any server CPUs that are useful for this
application, unfortunately.

-andy