Excessive bandwidth use

[Shachar Shemesh]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 12:45:12PM +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>   
>> I'm running an OR called "hamakor"
>>     
> [snip]
>   
>> Can anyone shed some light as to why the bandwidth limits I set are not
>> being respected?
>>     
>
> You have rate limited it to 800KB/s, and from the graphs I can see,
> it appears to be using roughly that.
>   
So it does! Despite the fact that, when reading the docs, I said to
myself "pay attention - they measure KB rather than Kb", I made the
mistake. Thanks for spotting it.
> Perhaps you are one of those people who count bandwidth in fractions of
> bytes rather than in bytes?
>   
Let's see.
When I buy a network card, I get its speed in bits per second.
When I buy a network switch, it lists its speed in bits per second
When I talk to my ISP, they measure bandwidth in bits per second
When I configure QoS in the Linux kernel, they measure in bits per second
Way back, when I was using an analog modem, it measured bandwidth in
BAUD, which was, well, bits per second
When I bring up Munin to view statistics it displays them in bits per second
Do you see a pattern yet?

So what do you know. It appears I *AM* one of those people! Strange ol' me.

So just so we make sure we're on the same page here, when the docs say
"K" you mean 1000, and when you say "M" you mean 1,000,000, right? Or
are you "one of those people" who count bytes in a little over the
metric meaning of the suffixes?

All sarcasm aside, if the whole industry measures a quantity using a
certain unit, and one program measures it using another, I call that "a
usability bug".

Back to the subject at hand, though. It seems that up until this morning
Tor was not using the full bandwidth I was allowing it to. Does that
mean that I can assume that that's the current demand levels?
> --Roger
>   
Shachar