[tor-relays] 300mbps FreeBSD Tor relay on HPE MicroServer Gen10 (AMD X3421)

Neel Chauhan neel at neelc.org
Fri Dec 28 14:13:03 UTC 2018


Hi tor-relays@,

I have a Tor middle relay NeelTorRelay2 hosted on a 50 megabit symmetrical Verizon FiOS (FTTH/GPON) connection. The server used is a HPE MicroServer Gen10 (AMD X3421 quad-core version, 8GB DDR4 RAM). This relay can be seen here:

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/D5B8C38539C509380767D4DE20DE84CF84EE8299

My relay runs FreeBSD 11.2 and Tor runs in a "jail". I am using AESNI and Tor is configured to use OpenSSL cryptodev.

Here's the situation: I will be moving apartments in a few days, and Verizon is upgrading my broadband speed to 300 megabits symmetrical. I plan to use this extra bandwidth for Tor. Right now, I set my RelayBandwidthRate to my line speed (yes really!), and plan to increase this setting according to my new speed.

I know that Tor is not optimized for multicore CPUs, and that's the reason why I am posting here.

My question is that can Tor work on the HPE MicroServer Gen10 with the AMD X3421 (or one with a similar computer of any brand with a similar performance CPU, whether desktop or server, Intel or AMD) with all 300 megabits to a single instance or would I need two instances (each at 150 megabits each)? Looking at my top usage, I average at about 20-30% CPU usage on my 50 megabit relay.

Also keep in mind that:

 * I am using my own router instead of Verizon's and I plan to keep doing so
 * I want to keep using FreeBSD on my server and do not want to run Linux
 * I would prefer to have a single instance, but can use multiple if I have to
 * When I move, I will upgrade my server to FreeBSD 12.0
 * My server supports hardware accelerated AES and SHA. I am using this on FreeBSD with the aesni kernel module and Tor with "HardwareAccel 1" and "AccelName cryptodev"

Thank You,

Neel Chauhan

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https://www.neelc.org/


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