[tor-relays] Which OS gives usually the best performance for a relay?

[Kenneth Freeman]

On 09/07/2016 10:34 AM, George wrote:
> On 09/07/16 11:54, Farid Joubbi wrote:
>> I had not thought of the diversity that way.
> 
> There's a host of diversity issues with Tor to cover, but I tend to
> think OS diversity is one of the more critical.

With apologies to Akira Kurosawa, I think of this as the Seven Samurai
Problem. Diverse samurai are a given; their optimum deployment is not.

> The ultimate difficulty in doing a test comparison is creating identical
> scenarios.  Tor is a  more or less random anonymity routing network,
> which breaks any notion of repeatability.

The Tor network is uniquely protean.

>> I realize that I might not get any good answers since my question is
>> kind of broad and unspecific.
> 
> Clearly you are asking the right questions, which is what's critical IMHO.
> 
> Not directing to the OP, but I also strongly think one should stick with
> the OS they are most comfortable in administering, regardless of
> diversity questions.  If someone's never used a Unix-like system before,
> and can't manage to edit a file with vi(1), start elsewhere :)

I couldn't agree more. I don't get under the hood much; I rely on Ubuntu
Linux and Tor's default configuration. Other relays are much more finely
tuned, I'm sure, on machinery replete with all the bells and whistles.
In this regard the old engineering dictum that "The best is the enemy of
the good enough" (which itself dates to Voltaire) is pertinent. We have
a diverse ecosystem of volunteers, which perforce deploys a host of
heterogeneous attack surfaces. I'm not going to tweak what I don't
understand. I'm not a Kyūzō; I'm a Heihachi.


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