[tor-relays] huge increase in relay traffic

Gordon Morehouse gordon at morehouse.me
Sun Sep 1 02:27:15 UTC 2013


-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

Richard Budd:
> I've been following your Pi thread, and up until yesterday I've
> haven't seen any problems at all on mine. Of course it's only
> running 2 meg bandwidth total. So I thought that might be the
> difference.

Yes, I have 3Mbps outbound and I currently let the Pi burst up to
about 80% of that or so, though it rarely sees that much traffic for
long.  It's still pretty variable, especially when I lose my Stable
flag.  :(

> Then last night my router (Asus Asus RT-N66U running Shibby Tomato)
> became very sluggish. Log showed pages of    "Tomato user.warn
> kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet" So I increased
> Max Connections and Hash Table sizes by about 50% and that has
> seemed to relieve the router problems.

This is a common problem with Tor and Bittorrent and especially the
combination of both.  Just be aware, many router firmwares aren't too
smart and will let you increase the size of your conntrack tables past
the point where the router will run out of RAM and start killing
processes, thus necessitating a reboot.  This includes whatever
version of Tomato I'm running.

> Top shows Tor using 60 to 80% CPU. But it's not doing anything else
> so I'll let it run till it gives up. (it's been running for over 70
> days)

Maybe you could enable the statistics keeping that krishna e bara
suggested[1]?  I haven't peeked at them yet to see what they look
like, but they might prove valuable to figuring out the Pi's limits.

In my extremely constrained free time I am working on purchasing a
small flotilla of Pis to deploy at various friends' houses and use as
a testbed for my "plug-and-forget Tor relay on a Pi that doesn't mess
with your video streaming, games or torrents" project[2].  So, I'll
have to eventually look at those files since they'll be useful to
*me*.  :)

[1]
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-August/002590.html

[2] https://github.com/gordon-morehouse/cipollini

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iQEcBAEBCgAGBQJSIqYBAAoJED/jpRoe7/uj3zYIANHpgLJLu2Xkk8cmy4YL0bFE
Z+N8x7DQ1teOn1hUso1k0b0kFHlPOaSNLwccQ31JRyQyN0NbWd7AN2hw+jwryX5J
SjLkJibZEP30OBqpXfs1tcb0aghbofCVZlHEn8H7SpcEdflhFBE4tiGPVKWiIT5j
vhahUvFqH3jugwhRTnr68E8oMsCKNYCwgh1AI26lxqJD25lmNmZi38mwNgpByx44
NTUPHD0xToGxkAvlgYAvfkKNIjI/kLMy51qgSTjupMzr3Qjxq6HxnaSORGMlMPga
FGxahifwFMQLyvJ1L1lvZyBNWx4YP8gXIBNoSWmwYRFd6RzHU+poRua9WH5SkTA=
=eDJm
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


More information about the tor-relays mailing list