[tor-relays] slow relays

[teor]

> On 14 Jan 2019, at 09:32, ronqtorrelays at risley.net wrote:
> 
> Thanks. I'm curious what, in the consensus, suggests that I'm too far from the Authority Servers? I don't know how to read that page; I can't even figure out what units they're using to report bandwidth.

It's a unitless amount due to scaling, but it starts as kilobytes per second.

> One of the relays is one hop away (via a lightly-loaded terabit switch) from the (formerly known as) Level3 tier 1 network, so should have excellent peering worldwide unless CenturyLink has degraded it since their acquisition last year. The other sits two or three hops (depending, apparently, on the phase of the moon) from the tier 1 network run by Telia. So, at least with my limited understanding of internet topography, they should both be topologically close to most hosts worldwide.

Your relays are on the south and west coasts of the US, which means they're
further away from the Tor bandwidth authorities in northern North America and
north western Europe.

Tor load-balances for client latency and bandwidth capacity. Relays with higher
latency or lower bandwidth are only partly used. But this reserve capacity helps
during peak times.

Tor also load-balances according to relay position in the circuit. Tor guards
currently have about 200 Gbps capacity, and clients are currently using
75 Gbps, or 37%:
https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html

So your guards have slightly lower than average utilisation:
1 Mbps / 5.1 Mbps = 20%
1.2 Mbps / 7.4 Mbps = 16%

I wouldn't worry about it too much.

> On 14 Jan 2019, at 09:49, niftybunny <abuse at to-surf-and-protect.net> wrote:
> 
> Hard to tell. A few years ago I had an ISP with a fat shiny direct line to the DE-CIX. So in theory everything was wonderful, it was not. Rule of thumb: Get as near as possible to the auth servers, same data center would be perfect :)
> 
> Having all relays in one data center would make the state actors very very happy. I am still a fan of more auth servers all over the world. But who am I to tell what to do. 

We're focused on migrating to a stable bandwidth measurement system for the
next year or so. A failed bandwidth measurement system is even worse: then
relays can just claim to be as big as they want to be.

After that, we'll look at geographical dispersion. But if we spread the relay load
out too far, client performance will suffer. (And users wont see reliable, consistent
performance, which is even worse.)

> If you really want to know how much Tor will give you, run it as an Exit. Tor will love you and gives you every bit of traffic it has. Please don’t do this from home or if you are not sure what you are doing etc . (insert big fat disclaimer) 

Yes, Tor needs more exits, their utilisation is often close to 75%.

T
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