[tor-relays] West Coast US Tor Relays Slow - Low Consensus Weight versus East Coast

[Neel Chauhan]

Hi network-health@/tor-relays@ mailing lists,

I noticed one thing: Tor relays on the West Coast US (and Canada) are 
generally slower than those on say the East Coast and in Europe.

I moved to the West Coast this January, but this was not an issue in the 
past when looking at dedicated servers I had from the West Coast prior 
to this year.

These are two middle relay instances on an Gigabit FTTH connection (Wave 
G in Redmond, WA):

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/B0F9BA27944FA59E3B1A182208FF7C0CFF5497B2
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/DB710B14D7329B7289CFCC547F48EF53F812C40D

The Consensus Weight often is slower than the Advertised Bandwidth, and 
isn't ramping up despite having lots of bandwidth. I set 
RelayBandwidthRate to about 500 Mbps on each instance.

This isn't just a Wave G problem, this affects almost every relay in the 
West Coast including other Gigabit ISPs such as AT&T (AS7018) and Sonic 
(AS46375), as well as hosting companies and colocation facilities.

For instance, my Los Angeles-based Exit relays at Psychz Networks 
(AS40676) show this issue (however they are new):

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/156AAC3FAD1ACC8906316519DCB444B8C77E4EBF
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A69CEB30328B1E85C6B167FECAF2F509CBD9517F

Even Emerald Onion has this issue:

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/09DCA3360179C6C8A5A20DDDE1C54662965EF1BA

What is causing this issue and is there a solution? Is it backbone 
congestion due to COVID-19? The high load on dirauths? sbws regressions?

Can I help fix this issue? I am a Core Tor contributor and am open to 
also working on sbws.

Is there a way to optimize my relays (they run FreeBSD).

-Neel

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https://www.neelc.org/