[tor-relays] Expected relay performance

[fugel1]

Hi all!

I've been running two tor relays [1] on the same machine for the past three weeks or so on my home connection (1 gigabit fibre).

When I was looking for appropriate hardware (I needed something fanless) I was surprised at the almost complete absense of information online about what kind of relay performance one can expect from different cpus.

Until the current relays speedtest that started on August 25 [2], my relays were slowly ramping up to about 4 MB/s up and down with a consensus weight of 15-19000. Hence, I was expecting to have to wait a few months to find out what the hardware was capable of, BUT then the mentioned test started!

Both my relays instantly got an advertised bandwidth over 70 MB/s, and soon after consensus weights of 85000 and 105000 respectively (maatuska even hade the latter at 190000 for a while). The relays are now pushing over 20 MB/s each which enables me to start filling the current performance information void with the following:

A fanless Core i5-8250 with HT disabled, running OPNSense 21.7.1, can push 22 MB/s of tor traffic up and down on each of two tor instances, with each main tor process consuming no more than 50 percent of one core and an average across all cores of 35-38 percent.

Sorry about the lengthy post! :)

[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/F387C5F92B784137933202BB5E4F7DDC0E8C40A6
[2] https://status.torproject.org/experiments/2021-08-26-relay-speed-test/
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