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

[Roman Mamedov]

On Fri, 28 Dec 2018 14:13:03 +0000
"Neel Chauhan" <neel at neelc.org> wrote:

> 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.

You could just remove that line altogether. Without it, Tor will use as much as
it can, not wasting time on pointless bandwidth housekeeping.

That line could be useful to limit bandwidth in case you notice Tor interfers
with your normal Internet browsing, but since you just set it to 100% of line
speed currently, it seems like you're not using it for that.

> 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.

It is hard to tell, but that shouldn't be a very important question, just run
one for a while, see if it constantly bumps into 100% CPU, if it does, add a
2nd one.

The CPU is a bit peculiar, the base frequency is 2.1 Ghz, but it turboes up to
a whopping 3.4 Ghz. One could imagine it does that only as long as not all of
its cores are utilized, so maybe adding a second instance will be somewhat
detrimental to overall performance.

On the other hand, if you want to use your network connection to its fullest,
then running two instances is advisable, I'd say one instance will use at
most 200-250 Mbit of your 300, but with two you can actually get to 2x140 or
so. But of course the former case is actually preferable if the connection is
also used for other tasks aside from Tor.

-- 
With respect,
Roman