[tor-relays] What's a "useful" relay?

[Andreas Krey]

On Sat, 24 Dec 2016 10:11:51 +0000, Rana wrote:
> @balbea16
...
> I am even more confused than you. My 1300 connections relay has a consensus weight <https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/707A9A3358E0D8653089AF32A097570A96400CC6>  of 38 (thirty eight). That???s less than 1% of your weight, despite having 26% the number of connections you have.

Number of connections is a very indirect metric. Especially any
somewhat-used relay will have connections open to most of the bigger
relays, since the paths for which this relay is selected come from and
go to arbitrary relays, weighted by their bandwidth. So if you have
few connection, this is an indication that your relay doesn't get used
much. (My numbers are around 4000 and 2000 for the two of mine, with a
factor of eight between them in the carried traffic).

> Besides, I could never understand why people measure the ???size??? of the relay by the number of connections.

I never noticed anybody did. The number of connections only come into play when

- your VPS has a connection limit that is too low,

- you're connected to the internet via a NAT/state-keeping router/modem/thingy
  that can't handle as many simultaneous connections.

> My guess is you can have a large number of dead connections.

Actually no. They time out. And probably actually yes, as many
connections may not be in use at a specific given point.

Andreas

-- 
"Totally trivial. Famous last words."
From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org>
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800