[tor-relays] Questions about Tor consensus weight & swag

[s7r]

shruub via tor-relays wrote:
I also (stupidly) tried to have a cron restarting
> my tor daemon daily which also resulted in the latter. So I wonder, if
> there is any way to have a relay run more stable and I suppose with a
> somewhat higher consensus weight (I can only asssume making some further
> changes in advertising bandwidth etc.
> 

Restarting it on demand is the worst thing you can do. Even if it's 
overloaded, it's much better to leave it running as overloaded and have 
stable uptime history than to restart it. Restarting it makes you lose 
flags, and it also might be the reason your consensus weight was lowered.

If you know the limits of your resources you are better of by using:

RelayBandwidthRate X MBytes
RelayBandwidthBurst Y MBytes
MaxAdvertisedBandwidth Z MBytes

(I prefer just using the first two without MaxAdvertisedBandwidth).

It's usually a good idea to have RelayBandwidthBurst much bigger than 
RelayBandwidthRate. Example X = 8 Y = 20, you will see constantly 8 MB/s 
via your machine. If that is OK for your CPU, RAM and bandwidth, 
otherwise use other values.

If you don't have enough bandwidth to overload your CPU/RAM you don't 
need to set this as Bandwidth authorities will assign your relay such a 
low weight that it won't reach the bottleneck.


> My second question(s) is/are concerning the tor swag (I hope that's
> allowed to ask here). Firstly, what is the actual Speed requirement? In
> the tor ecosystem, every unit is MBs, and only on the swag site its KBs.
> But if my calculations are correct, 500KBs = 500000Bs = 0.5MBs which
> doesn't really make sence, imo(but I probably misscalculated somewhere).
> Secondly, does running mean it's uptime (aka Last Restarted) or the Time
> it was first seen?
You can set MBytes, GBytes, KBytes - don't need to compute yourself the 
Bs in order to reach a desired value of MBs.

As for what is the minimum required speed, there are mixt opinions here. 
There is _certainly_ a threshold where a relay becomes a problem rather 
than useful, when the resources spend to measure it, include it in the 
consensus and deliver its descriptors to clients overweight the speed it 
provides. There's not a value established yet for this as far as I know, 
but it certainly should be one. 500 KBs is too little for our days, IMO, 
at least 1 MB/s is even too little for mobile devices on 3G (we have 5G 
ready...).

You mean the `Running` flag? That means the relay is `running` $now 
where $now is the last time the majority of directory authorities voted 
that they can reach your relay (usually, last authority vote).

you also have `last restarted` and `first seen` separately for the other 
values you mentioned. `first seen` is only used for metrics, historic 
purposes while `last restarted` has some effect over flags (`HSDir`, 
`Guard`, `Stable`, etc.).

Thanks for running a relay!

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 495 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/attachments/20230218/28d2faa0/attachment.sig>