[tor-relays] How can we trust the guards?

[Rana]

>Any people who will use your relay on a circuit will also damn you to run such small relay. This is so slow and not usable for day to day web surfing, specially if you are well connected to Internet (fiber or decent ADSL).
>Personnally, I have around this speed directly for my ADSL Internet connection (500/80kB), and I rant each day I have to upload something…

The question remains whether  NOT having access to my relay makes life easier for people. Sometimes I guess you are right. But when all the big relays get overloaded, small relays could provide MORE bandwidth than large relays.Both your and my statements are qualitative, I would like someone who knows the numbers to respond.

>Memory and TCP ports ?
>A node need to maintain thousands of circuits. This consumes a lot of memory (400MB on one of my guard) and a lot of TCP sockets (14k sockets).

There are 850 MB unused memory on my $35 Pi relay that is used to 7% of its link capacity. Therefore the memory limitation you cited is irrelevant.

>Those parameters don’t scale very well if you have more nodes (65k TCP port only, or some hundred of GB of RAM). 

HUNDRED GB of RAM? I believe you mean hundred MB? In this case ditto.

>Currently, with standard hardware, seems we can’t host more than 10 or 20× more nodes than today without hitting some hardware limit.

10x more nodes than today sounds good to me. My understanding is that Tor is nowhere near breaking out of its 7K and moving to this limit.  Therefore, the spare capacity of small relays could be used.

Rana