New user question about Directory mirroring & bittorent

[Ashton Vaz]

> Hello all.  My name is Nate.

Hey Nate!

> I just started using tor as a client and server.  I have 2 questions 
> that I can't find an answer to in the wiki and docs.  I have my 
> BandwidthRate, BandwidthBurst set to 50KB as my ADSL line is 500KB 
> down and 90KB up.

Don't forget to set AccountingMax & AccountingStart as well.  If you 
don't, you could be in for a huge price shock at the end of the month.  
Many ISPs have a monthly bandwidth cap and charge ridiculous amounts of 
money for each MB or GB over the cap.  In your case each month at full 
utilization, you would use 248 GB [(50KB/s up + 50KB/s down) * 60 
seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month]for Tor 
traffic alone!  If you were with my ISP, you'd have to pay an additional 
$ 1, 128 CAD [(248-60) * $6/GB] each month.  That's why I'd strongly 
urge you to set up a reasonable AccountingMax & daily AccoutingStart.

> Any advice on how to carve up my bandwidth for Tor, torrent, Web 
> browser, E-Mail would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Tor version: 0.1.0.16-1~breezy.1
> ADSL
> 500KB down
> 90KB up

In my case (rogers.com), I have a 60GB monthly limit (5Mbps down, 
768Kbps up -> 640KBps down, 96KBps up) with a 6 CAD/GB charge if I 
exceed it.  Since there's 4 computers sharing my connection (email, 
webserving, gaming, Shareaza, Azureus) while I'm also running Tor & a 
webserver I have to be careful with my usage.  Read the notes for 
AccountingStart to understand why I've chosen daily & not monthly 
accounting for Tor.  Here are my current settings for bandwidth control:
    BandwidthRate 30 KB
    BandwidthBurst 40 KB
    MaxAdvertisedBandwidth 30 KB
    AccountingMax 262144 KB
    AccountingStart day 00:00
According to the settings above, I'll use (256MB/day up + 256MB/day 
down) * 30 days = 15 GB.  I'm running Tor, i2p, Freenet, web server, 4 
browsers, 3 Azureus, 3 Shareaza, 2 gamers, 3 email clients. This leaves 
me with 8GB per month "spare" and no noticeable performance drop.

For each Shareaza client (x3) and Azureus client (x3) I have 192KBps, 
28KBps up.  That leaves me with about 64KBps down, 12KBps up spare even 
if all three clients are running simultaneously.  This is acceptable for 
our browsing, emailing & gaming purposes.  Your mileage may vary!

You can probably double my Shareaza/Azureus settings if you're only 
using a single computer and still have a reasonable experience. Once 
again - *please* watch your maximum bandwidth - don't go over your 
monthly cap. Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Ashton