[tor-relays] Which is the most useful: relay or bridge

[dmz21]

On Friday, March 18th, 2022 at 23:06, Thoughts <thoughts at kevinsthoughts.com> wrote:

> Currently running both a guard relay and a bridge, one each on two
>
> different systems, but both behind the same firewall and static IP.
>
> Curious if this is a good idea, or if one or the other is of much
>
> greater value.

(Guard) Relay IP addresses are publicly available to anyone. Running a bridge on an IP address that is already publicly known to run Tor, kind of defeats the purpose of a bridge: to allow people to connect from regions that block Tor.

> Seeing about 2200 inbound, 2800 outbound connections on my relay per
>
> nyx, with an observed speed of 5 MB/s (only a few days into the guard
>
> ramp-up phase)
>
> Seeing about 20 connected clients on the bridge, which is advertising
>
> 2.2 MiB/s per the metrics page. R/W rates around around 150k per that
>
> same page, about 1/4th of the average on the guard relay.
>
> Thoughts?

I see similar results (within a factor of 2) for an obfs4 bridge here.