[tor-relays] Relay Bandwidth Limit

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 01:18:01PM +0000, Dan wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I’ve been running my first relay for a few weeks now. The VPS provider I chose provides 5TB of bandwidth per month so I have set AccountingMax to “5 TB” and AccountingStart to
> “day 1 00:00”. It looks as though my relay is going to blow past that limit based on the average data transferred per day and how many days are left in the month. Will it simply stop transferring data when the monthly limit is hit?

Yes, that's how it works.

The one catch to keep an eye out for is that different ISPs count
bandwidth differently, and by default when you set AccountingMax to 5
TBytes, it means up to 5 TBytes in each direction. If your ISP means
"2.5 TBytes in each direction" when it says 5TB of bandwidth per month
(i.e. it counts each byte twice), then you could be in for a surprise.

See the AccountingMax section in the man page for more details, and
see the AccountingRule option in the man page for how to tell Tor that
your ISP means something different than Tor expected.

--Roger