Why so little bandwidth used?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:52:41AM -0500, Steve Snyder wrote:
> Check out the Router Detail page at http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/
>for my stats.  It shows an average of about 35KB - 40KB with rare peaks
>at 100KB.  This confirms my observation that Tor is not actually using
>the 100KB limit I specified.

I should also clarify that the Torstatus graphs come from the bandwidth
that your relay publishes in its "extra-info" descriptor. That bandwidth
is aggregated into 15 minute chunks before your relay publishes it, so it
won't give away too much detail about exactly how big the flows were when.

So the "rare peaks at 100KB" that you see are your relay being spiked at
its max bandwidth rate for 15 minutes. It's good that sustained spikes
are rare.

If you want to get a better sense of the actual per second bandwidth use,
you could run Vidalia or arm, connect them to your relay, and look at
their graphs.

--Roger