[tor-relays] Hardware requirements for a fast Tor relay

Gary C. New garycnew at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 9 20:12:10 UTC 2021


It's surprising that you're running into CPU issues. It's typically RAM that is exhausted first.




I have 5 x Dual Core 256MB Tor Relay Nodes loadbalanced as a Single Middle Relay that never have CPU issues. It's always a matter of running out of RAM for me. The loadbalanced Tor Relay maintains between 6K-8K circuits and between 100-200GB of Tor traffic per day.




Presently, 2 of the Tor Nodes are down, but you can see that for those Tor Nodes that are up my CPU load is low and memory is approaching the 32MB cutoff that I've configured.




# stat-tor-nodes      

Living_Room-C293                                        

 12:52:23 up 1 day, 12:42,  load average: 0.80, 0.54, 0.46                                                       

Data_Center-D448                                        

 12:52:24 up 1 day, 12:42,  load average: 0.69, 0.69, 0.71                                                       

Office-3C73                                             

 12:52:24 up 1 day, 12:41,  load average: 2.58, 2.84, 3.75                                                       

Garage-AE61                                             

 12:52:25 up 1 day, 12:42,  load average: 0.00, 0.07, 0.10                                                       

Wiring_Closet-5610                                      

 12:52:25 up 1 day, 12:41,  load average: 0.24, 0.33, 0.41                                                       

Living_Room-C293                                        


MemFree:          110696 kB                             

Data_Center-D448                                        

MemFree:           42744 kB                             

Office-3C73                                             

MemFree:           86792 kB                             

Garage-AE61                                             

MemFree:          193384 kB                             

Wiring_Closet-5610                                      

MemFree:           38684 kB                             

Living_Room-C293                                        


2000                                                    

Data_Center-D448                                        

2710                                                    

Office-3C73                                             

0                                                       

Garage-AE61                                             

0                                                       

Wiring_Closet-5610                                      

1854




It might help to provide your torrc config.

—
This Message Originated by the Sun.
iBigBlue 63W Solar Array (~12 Hour Charge)
+ 2 x Charmast 26800mAh Power Banks
= iPhone XS Max 512GB (~2 Weeks Charged) 

    On Tuesday, November 9, 2021, 8:48:09 AM PST, failing.flyaway443--- via tor-relays <tor-relays at lists.torproject.org> wrote:  
 
 Hi everyone,
about two weeks ago, I signed up for a VPS with a cloud provider and set up a Tor relay. I installed Debian 11 Bullseye, secured it, and then set up Tor 0.4.6.8 and started the relay.
The VPS had the following specs: 1vCore, 2GB RAM, 40TB traffic per month on a 1Gbit/s link. I throttled the traffic accordingly so that the monthly limit of 40TB would not be exceeded. Nevertheless, the CPU load was extreme, the server was running at full capacity and crashed several times.
Since I want to help the Tor network with a fast relay I now signed up for a root server  which has the following specs: Dual core CPU, 8GB ECC RAM, 2,5Gbit link, 1Gbit guaranteed, unlimited traffic.
I set this thing up with Debian 11 Bullseye again and Tor 0.4.6.8. Since my bandwith gets throttled when I use more than a certain amount of traffic/month and at the same time (!) on average more than a certain amount of bandwith for more than one hour, I set the MaxBandwith to 1000Mbit/sec (equals 125MB/sec).
This relay is up and running for a few days now, and I already have around 4000 incoming and outgoing connections. My bandwith is not fully used yet, but sometimes I see spikes of 20MB/s. What concerns me is that the CPU load again is sometimes 40-50% on both cores, even though this relay is not fully used yet. 
Can somebody tell me if it is even possible to run such a fast relay on this hardware?
Should I set a more restrictive bandwith throttle myself, or go for a quad core CPU?
I don't think I will ever run out of RAM this time, since I have 8GB.Thank you for your advice! All the best!
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