[tor-relays] What kind of hardware do I need for my relay

[Andy Weber]

Hi,

I added 0x3d006 and 0x3d007 on a Dedibox XC
(https://www.online.net/fr/serveur-dedie#perso) just a week ago. They
offer 1 GBps both directions unmetered (+2,5 Gbps to the internal
network) for very little money on an Intel Atom C2750 (with AES-NI,
cpubenchmark.net score: 3929, single-thread rating: 579) with 16GB of
RAM and 1TB of HDD (or 250GB SSD if you manage to grab one of those).
Those nodes are abviously still picking up speed but right now they're
already doing 8.73 and 5.6MB/s after only 8 days with both Tor processes
eating on avg. around 15% of CPU. At 100% load per instance that would
give me approx. 2 x 45 MB/s when running on full speed - altogether
~720Mbps which would barely be filling the pipe.

So on this particular machine 45MB/s per core (with a 579 points
single-thread rating) should add up to ~13 single-thread points being 1
MB/s. That may of course vary depending on your CPU architecture and
network but it just may be something to base your calculations on. Some
of my other nodes (0x3d001 and 0x3d002) are running on an E3-1245 v2 and
they both do around 40MB/s, single-thread score for that CPU is 1996
which would equal a bit less than 50 points per 1 MB/s. But on those
instances it's rather the pipe that's the limiting factor, I can't push
much more than 80MB/s there any direction any time of the day. Well,
check the stats for yourself and do your own calculations:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#search/0x3d00 (0x3d003 is running on an
E3-1230 v2 and 0x3d004 and 005 are an i7 6700K).

*tl;dr:* On average around 25~30 single-thread points for your CPU on
cpubenchmark.net should give you +/- 1MB/s of sustainable Tor traffic.

----
Andy Weber
andy at 0x3d.lu

On 28.03.2017 12:54, Petrusko wrote:
> Hey Farid,
> Have you found an interesting low cost hardware since this last message ?
> Sometimes I try to look for it, but there's a lot of little cards like
> RPi, Banana... sadly I think it has not enough CPU power to play with a
> lot of Tor traffic :s
>
> On the torserver webpage, there's a command line to know if the cpu has
> AES-NI acceleration.
>
> cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep aes
>
> For fun, I've tried on a laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo... no result shown
> after this command.
> So sadly this laptop will not be enough strong to have fun with this
> kind of crypto... it's sad because it's not burning a lot of watts!
>
> Farid Joubbi :
>> OK. I thought from the beginning that my relay running the Banana Pi would be capable of handling more traffic.
>> I have asked about it before, and got some really good answers.
>> I still can't completely explain why it does not handle more.
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