[tor-relays] Tor relay from home - end of experiment?

[Rana]

>> A. The fact that the Authorities are located in West Europe and North America does not mean that the USERS are there.

>The question is what volume a relay can carry, and not how well it is connected to a particular place in the world.

I beg to differ. My experiment with two identical Pies in the same country showed that the alleged volume that the relay can carry IS dependent on how well it is connected to the specific DirAuths (which represent "particular places in the world"). The fact is, the two nodes are HW/SW-wise identical and both have much more Internet connection bandwidth than the bandwidth allocated for Tor. They do, however, have different numbers as to how much traffic they can carry; which in view of the above IMHO can be attributed only to the difference in how well their respective IPSs connect with the ISPs in places where DirAuths are located.

>> B.  There are about 7000 relays total, many of them probably limping just like my 2 relays and not being useful. There are tens of thousands of Pi owners who have their Pis just sitting there and many >>of them would be happy to run relays if Tor network would let them do so usefully.
>
>I may soon have an opportunity to hook up a pi to a sufficiently large pipe. (My home connection makes such things pointless.)

Your upcoming connection of a Pi to a large pipe is irrelevant to the issue reported by me, since clearly in my case the Pi is not the bottleneck. On the other hand, your parenthesized sentence is very relevant - it seems that you have given up on home based relay, too. I did see a report from someone boasting the large bandwidth via Pi at home - but this seems to be an exception rather than a rule, and he was in Germany, probably at a cozy digital distance from the local DirAuth :)