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

Rana ranaventures at gmail.com
Thu Dec 15 07:53:55 UTC 2016


OK then let me summarize. 
 
1.       You are running a Pi from Cologne, at 21 mbps (measured) peak, 900 kbps (measured) average utilization by Tor, with 1300 connections.
2.       Your Pi is under-utilized, probably limited by your ISP’s peering with those to which DirAuths are connected. 20% CPU utilization, 50% memory utilization. 
3.       Given that part of the memory is used by Linux kernel, and that the PI Ethernet interface is nominally 100 mbps, the Pi is probably able to sustain up to 3000 connections. 
 
Bottom line: the $35 Pi is a killer and running a Tor node with up to 3000 connections on another computer is probably a big waste of money. Comments welcome.
 
 
From: tor-relays [mailto:tor-relays-bounces at lists.torproject.org] On Behalf Of balbea16
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2016 9:04 AM
To: tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
Subject: Re: [tor-relays] Tor relay from home - end of experiment?
 
Pls. refer to may answers after each of your questions.
 
 


-------- Ursprüngliche Nachricht --------
Von: Rana <ranaventures at gmail.com <mailto:ranaventures at gmail.com> > 
Datum: 15.12.16 07:44 (GMT+01:00) 
An: tor-relays at lists.torproject.org <mailto:tor-relays at lists.torproject.org>  
Betreff: Re: [tor-relays] Tor relay from home - end of experiment? 
>Hi There
>This is a pretty interesting topic. I have been running a Rasp Pi 3 based relay since August this year. By now, I am up to about 1,300 incomming and outgoing connections, and a max of >about 21mbps. This is about 50% of the max. upload speed. Consensus weight is between 3,000 and 6,000. The CPU is running at 20% max. However, my local ISP disconnects me after 24 >to 36 hours. From my point of view this is the only disadvantage. 
> 
>For a home based relay, is that good, bad,  or just average? Is there a chance for me to get a stable, or even guard flag? What are your experiances?
>Mike
My experience is bad, the relay is not taking off at all, I have consensus weight of 19 and am sending less than 20 MB every 6 hours despite having bandwidth measured by Tor of between 70 and 120 KB/s. The total up bandwidth I have in ISP connection is 1.5 mbps and this is probably the issue. I also run this on Pi 3. I did, however, get a stable flag after 5 days, and have had it since then. My IP is dynamic and did not change in these 5 days or in the 4 days that passed since I got the Stable flag. My relay nickname is ZG0.
Based on your experience I think your are doing fabulously well for a home relay, and that what really counts is the ISP bandwidth, and the Stable flag does not have much to do with how much traffic you get. Moreover, your 20% cpu util confirms my opinion that Pi is the perfect, most cost efficient way to run a relay and that running it on a larger computer is a waste of resources and money (up to the point Raspi chokes which we are yet to discover :))
Moreover, clearly Pi’s cpu power will never be the bottleneck, only its memory size. You have a total of 1GB of memory on your Pi 3, what’s your memory utilization?  about 513 MB 
What’s the total traffic the Pi sends every 6 hours (reported in the Tor log file /var/log/tor/notices.log and, for the previous time window, in /var/log/tor/notices.log.1)? 
About 19 GB in the last 6 hour period, with a total sent 2671.53 GB and received 2625.31 GB. 
What’s your relay’s nickname? Balbea16
 
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