Regulating bandwidth

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 10:59:07AM -0700, Andrew Del Vecchio wrote:
> What's the best way to ensure that Tor spreads bandwidth more or less
> evenly over a AccountingMax period? Currently, my 1GB of allocation
> gets eaten up over the first three hours or so of operation.

Currently we recommend that you manually set your BandwidthRate so
your accounting quota is expected to be exhausted halfway through your
accounting period.

See the last paragraph of
http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#Hibernation
for details.

> I could
> set the rate limits lower, but is there currently a way for Tor to
> make inteligent decisions based on the average load? In other words,
> in an ideal world, Tor would determine the average load, and normalize
> it over the 24 hour AccountingMax period, giving the average rate as
> the upper bandwidth rate during the day. This average would move a bit
> over time, but always aim for AccountingMax over the course of the
> average day.

I wouldn't object to a config option AccountingBandwidthAuto or the
like that does what you describe. This would save people from needing to
do that calculation. In fact, the naive implementation could be really
easy -- it could just take the AccountingMax and accounting period and
do the math. But it could also try to get smarter, as you say.

So, feel free to submit a patch. :)

--Roger