[tor-relays] Questions on traffic differences between two Exit relays in two different locations

Green Dream greendream848 at gmail.com
Thu Jun 2 19:59:46 UTC 2016


I've found that utilization and consensus weight of relays is highly
variable, and the causes aren't always easy to pin down. There are a lot of
factors that can contribute. A few off the top of my head:

- CPU performance. AES-NI helps here. It seems unlikely this is your issue
if your CPU utilization is only half.

- If using a VPS, the behavior of other VMs using the same underlying
hardware can be a big factor.

- Bandwidth authorities connectivity to your relay has an impact. Is some
peering point between a bandwidth authority and your node over-subscribed?

Some of this is out of your control and hard to predict ahead of time. When
I want to add another relay to the network, I've found it useful to bring
up a bunch of relays at once, measure the performance of each, and then
keep the best performing relay. Automation (I use Ansible) helps with this.
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