[tor-relays] TOR relays killing internet speed

[William Kane]

Hi,

> if i have these relays running it kills a 10Gbps fiber optic line

this sounds like a configuration issue on your router, relays tend to
establish tons of concurrent connections and some routers either can't
handle it or think it's some sort of attack - especially if you run
three relays all routed through the same router - the relays will
likely end up sharing source and destination IP's, making it even more
likely to trigger built-in filters.

Do you have any reason to rate-limit the entire virtual machine,
instead of just the tor instance?

If not, I'd advise you to deploy rate limiting by using the tor
configuration file, instead of Proxmox - last time I used PVE the
rate-limiting was severely broken, and on some customers VM's, it even
broke completely - no rate limiting being applied at all or network
access being cut off randomly, despite having sane settings.

Tor has plenty of variables you can tune to rate-limit each instance,
take a look:

https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en#BandwidthRate
https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en#AccountingMax

> Each VM is limited to 1Mbps via proxmox.

Assuming this was just a typo, but if not, please fix it or get rid of
PVE's built in rate-limiting entirely.

- William

On 09/04/2021, John Csuti <postmaster at coolcomputers.info> wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I am hosting 3 VM's limited at 10Mbps all together. Each VM is limited
> to 1Mbps via proxmox. I have noticed if i have these relays running it
> kills a 10Gbps fiber optic line. All the way down to 50Mbps or worse
> depending on what the time of day. Any idea what i can try? I noticed
> this happen over the past few months maybe its increased usage on the
> relays not sure. According to TOR relay search the demand has spiked
> recently. I wondering why/how it could bypass the limits on both proxmox
> and pfsense.
>
> Thanks,
> John Csuti
> (216) 633-XXXX
>