[tor-relays] Guard flag and some irregularities

Roger Dingledine arma at mit.edu
Sat Dec 6 20:54:11 UTC 2014


On Sat, Dec 06, 2014 at 03:40:41PM -0500, Rafael Rodriguez wrote:
> https://atlas.thecthulhu.com/#details/48ADFCC561402D7EBB1CDE233F206B01D8FA0765
> 
> 1- Is it ok for the Guard flag to come and go so often?

Yes, it can oscillate for some relays, if some directory authorities
think the relay deserves the Guard flag and others don't.

It's not great, and we should probably fix the design sometime, but
it's also not so bad.

> I do not see
> anything wrong with my relay and it is pushing up to 12MBs at times. 

Are you sure? What tool are you using to measure this? If it's arm, be
ware that arm by default tells you throughput in bits, and Tor measures
things by bytes.

> Most of the time, my relay pushes between 3-7MB/s constantly and that's
> fine. But there are occasions in which I see it spike and send out as
> much as 12MB/s when I have set a limit of @6MB/s. 

Based on the graphs above, you're using maybe .5MB/s each way on
average. That reinforces my guess about the bits/bytes confusion.

> 2- Is Tor not respecting the limits? If it doesn't respect the limits
> consistently it might as well overkill my budget which translates into
> me killing the relay. 

See also
https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#BandwidthShaping

Thanks for running a relay!

--Roger



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