[tor-relays] Tor relay on Verizon FiOS/FTTH: Advertised Bandwidth capped at ~19.5MiB/s

[Roman Mamedov]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2019 13:05:47 -0500
Neel Chauhan <neel at neelc.org> wrote:

> Being capped at 200 Mbps was because `powerd` wasn't enabled on my 
> FreeBSD, and "turbo" frequencies weren't being used. Enabling `powerd` 
> means I feel my relay can handle 300 Mbps (and CPU usage dropped because 
> the clock speed increased). Previously 10 MB/s (80 Mbps) took 30% of 
> CPU, now the same amount of bandwidth takes 20%.

If you are not bumping into 100%, it shouldn't matter, especially at levels
like 30% or 20%, with plenty of headroom left.

> I feel it's my Linksys WRT1900AC because consumer routers aren't 
> designed for the traffic high-bandwidth Tor relays handle, even after 
> flashing things like OpenWrt.
> 
> Also see: 
> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/09/the-router-rumble-ars-diy-build-faces-better-tests-tougher-competition/
> 
> Would running two instances help with a consumer router's limited NAT 
> Table?

It is true that running two instances will multiply by 2x the amount of
connections the router has to keep track of.

There is no "limited NAT table" per se with OpenWRT, just whatever fits into
RAM (and will be progressively slower as CPU time to process it increases with
table size).

Take a look at what kind of loads the router currently experiences, things
such as average CPU load and RAM usage. OpenWRT shows both nicely even in the
web UI. The WRT1900AC has plenty of RAM (256 or 512MB depending on revision)
and a dual core CPU, so there is some hope that it is not currently the
bottleneck, and won't be even with two instances of Tor.

-- 
With respect,
Roman