[tor-relays] Which OS gives usually the best performance for a relay?

[George]

On 09/07/16 11:54, Farid Joubbi wrote:
> I had not thought of the diversity that way.

There's a host of diversity issues with Tor to cover, but I tend to
think OS diversity is one of the more critical.

These are some reports we generate at TDP:

https://torbsd.github.io/dirty-stats.html

> 
> Thanks for pointing it out.
> 
> 
> I am still interested in the subject though, if anyone has any
> specific examples of some kind of general rules of why one OS usually
> performs better than some other OS as a tor relay...
> 

There's lots of factors to consider once one is using similar hardware,
the same bandwidth and pipes, etc.

The ultimate difficulty in doing a test comparison is creating identical
scenarios.  Tor is a  more or less random anonymity routing network,
which breaks any notion of repeatability.

This piece makes a general case pretty clearly:

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2732268

However, the FreeBSD networking stack is known to be extremely fast and
optimized.

OpenBSD is built to be secure by default, so many default knobs are
aimed at keeping a live system secure. The most obvious parameter to
adjust is kern.maxfiles in the sysctls.

Certainly both are underrepresented in the Tor public network... .but
we're working on it. . .

> I realize that I might not get any good answers since my question is
> kind of broad and unspecific.

Clearly you are asking the right questions, which is what's critical IMHO.

Not directing to the OP, but I also strongly think one should stick with
the OS they are most comfortable in administering, regardless of
diversity questions.  If someone's never used a Unix-like system before,
and can't manage to edit a file with vi(1), start elsewhere :)

g

-- 



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