[tor-relays] relay not receiving very much traffic

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 08:51:57PM +0200, Tim Semeijn wrote:
> It looks like your node is running as guard. This usually drops your traffic for a   while before it builds up again.

Tim is referring to the phenomenon described here:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay

And it looks like that dip and rebuilding already happened:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/94F9D8D35C4A4851B1DAF85F70F90DB95065E81E

> >I deployed a new tor-relay about 2 months ago. It runs on a server with
> >2 Quad-cores, 8GB RAM and 1Gbit connection.

So yes, this is a mystery. I wonder if you have a 1gbit connection to
some parts of the Internet but not most of them?

How much bandwidth your relay uses is also a function of how much
spare capacity there is the network right now: so long as the green
and blue lines in this graph:
https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#bandwidth
are far enough apart, then you won't necessarily be saturated with
traffic. But it's still odd that you never see spikes higher, assuming
your network can really handle it.

> >Is this normal or may I have configured something wrong?
> >
> >Last time I had a relay running I received 100Mbit+ traffic...

What are the differences between your old torrc and your new one?

--Roger