Excessive bandwidth use

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, Jul 27, 2007 at 01:54:00PM +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> 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.

Great.

> 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?

K is 1<<10, and M is 1<<20.

> 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".

Right. Alas, I assure you there's a big community of people who'd be
confused and upset if we went the other way too. Most network things
measure in bits, and most application things measure in bytes.

Or said another way, most (unix) sysadmins measure application bandwidth
in bits, and most (Windows) users measure application bandwidth in bytes.

> 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?

You mean back when it was using about 10mbit? My guess is this would
be some limitation on your system or your network. Most likely network,
but all I have to go on are the graphs. :) An unconstrained Tor server
will use about 40mbit sustained these days if you let it.

--Roger