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

Roger Dingledine arma at torproject.org
Tue Feb 19 00:56:51 UTC 2019


On Sun, Feb 17, 2019 at 09:54:12PM -0500, Neel Chauhan wrote:
> This relay is hosted on a 300 mbps Verizon FiOS (FTTH/GPON) connection.
>[...]
> For some reason, the Advertised Bandwidth is not going above ~19.5 MiB/s.

Hi Neel!

The very short answer is that this could all be normal.

You might find some of the ideas in this wiki page useful:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/MyRelayIsSlow

Among the most important points:

* It's actually bad for the network for relays to be hitting their
capacity -- since it means user traffic is intentionally delayed at
that relay.

* Exit relays tend to attract as much traffic as they can provide, since
exit capacity is scarce in the network right now. But for non-exit relays,
you shouldn't be surprised if they don't fill their available bandwidth.
The traffic your relay receives has to do with how the load balancing
works, and actual total traffic from clients varies over time.

* The "torflow" bandwidth authority measurement system is pretty clearly
broken, in that it measures relays badly. This is known, and we've been
working to fix it, but "how come I have this weird bandwidth weight"
is a common question over the past few years. :(

So in summary, it might be that something on your side is unnecessarily
limiting your relay performance, but it could also just be that the "luck
of the draw" from the load balancing system is what gave you this load.

If you want to use more of your bandwidth, consider running two relays
as somebody suggested in this thread. Or just sit back and be happy at
your nice relay contribution. :)

(Another option is that you could open up your exit policy, but that's
probably a poor idea for a relay running at home.)

Thanks!
--Roger



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