[tor-relays] a couple noob questions

[mail at nothingtohide.nl]

Hi,

To give some answers:
Yes this is completely normal! It can take 2-3 months for a new guard relay to finally be 'ramped up'. Here you can read more about it: https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay/. Exit relays ramp up much faster in terms of bandwidth, but come with their own headaches/challenges vs. guard relays.
This is normal as well. I don't know speedtest-cli specifically, but I imagine it's a regular tcp/udp speedtest while Tor traffic is more likely to be CPU limited instead of network throughput limited. Just pushing some udp/tcp traffic with a speedtest is a great to find the limitations of your server's uplink (for example 1000 Mb/s down but 200 Mb/s up on certain VPS providers, which means Tor can use up to 200 Mb/s in practice). But the real bandwidth Tor will be able to push is more often limited by the CPU. You should slowly see your CPU utilization go towards 100% in the next couple of months (if the relay stays stable enough).
The Tor Project doesn't ask this of relay operators. Personally I regard VPS hosted Tor Relays as 'not/less secure' because of the trivial access parties have to these relays, their keys/certificates and their traffic, but as far as I know the Tor community/Project considers all relays to be equal however they are hosted. Do note that if you're running the relay from a legal entity in the EEA, that your VPS provider is a processor and needs to be registered as such in your own registry and stuff. Tor's data being encrypted doesn't exclude it from the GDPR because encryption is equal to pseudonymization instead of anonymization in the EEA. But if you're just a person running some Tor relays then you don't need to bother with this :-).
Sure it is! This way everyone can chime in and learn/contribute. On IRC/Element there is also a #tor-relay channel for chatting with other Tor operators if that's what you like to use.
Looking at your relay I see nothing out of the ordinary. If anything, I feel ~2 MB/s of traffic after a few days already is quite nice and also a bit more than many other guard relays expect in the first couple of days (it's a bit random in my experience) :). The question is whether the 7.66 MB/s advertised bandwidth based on the tests of the Tor network is true to your machine's capabilities. And you will soon find that out if you wait for the guard relay to age a bit.

One final thing: do note that Tor's single threaded architecture only let's it utilize a single CPU core (plus a bit of overhead on a second core). So let's say you have 4 vcores in your VPS, then you actually would need to run 2-4 Tor relays to be able to utilize those fully. Otherwise it will just cap at 1.2-1.4 cores. You can run up to 8 relays per IP address. If you have more than 2 cores, I would advice to already create 1 or more additional guard relays because they take months to ramp up. It's easier to delete a few redundant relays later than having to wait for new ones to ramp up :-).

Good luck running the relay and don't hesitate to ask more questions when you have them!

Cheers,

tornth



Aug 20, 2024, 07:50 by tor-relays at lists.torproject.org:

> Dear fellow relay operators,
>
> I've been hosting a tor relay on a VPS (strato) for a couple days now. I've never done this before, so I have a couple of questions:
>
> Is it normal for my relay to only use up only about 2 MB/s after nearly 5 days of uptime despite bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth?
> Is it normal for my relay to advertise > 7.37 MiB/s on its relay search page despite > bandwidth speed tests done with speedtest-cli generally reporting significantly higher bandwidth?
> Do I have to mark somewhere that I'm hosting the tor relay on a VPS (which means > technically>  a company also has control over the relay)?
> Is this mailing list a good place to ask these questions? Or am I reaching too many people by doing this?
>
> When I say I performed a bandwidth test, I mean I performed a bandwidth test with the speedtest-cli debian package. The test generally tells me I have about 217 MB/s download speed and 113 MB/s upload speed. The nickname of my relay is observatory123 and its fingerprint is:
> 45431BF8AB66C673942C1E344BB520625CE5F817
>
> Kind regards,
> observatory123
>

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