setting up a TOR relay

[basile]

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Maurizio Lombardi wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a little stupid question:
>
> In the near future i will buy a little MIPS-based board running Linux
> and i would like to set up a TOR relay with it.
> The problem is that i have an extremely limited amount of RAM ( 64 Mb
> ) and i read
> that a tor relay generally needs 768 Mb for a 10 Mbit connection.
>
> Considering the fact that my bandwidth is limited to 30 Kb/s (240 Kbps)
> can it works with just 64 Mb of RAM? (Maybe limiting the number of
connections?)
>
> What about 128 Mb of RAM?
>
> Thanks for the help.
>
Ciao Maurizio,

I have (tried) to run a tor relay on a Linksys WRT54G board with about
4MB of ram.  It does not work well and runs out of ram quickly.  I
gave the details of how I did it on this list so you can search the
archives.

As  a reference for how much ram one needs, I do have experience
running tor in an "embedded" environment but on an i386 box.  Node
"simba" has been running for months and boots tor-ramdisk, a micro
linux distro which basically sets up a ramdisk root filesystem with
the bare essentials for a tor server.  I set aside 128MB for ramdisk
and that's more than enough for BandwidthRate 150KB with
BandwidthBurst 200KB --- in fact its overkill.  From memory I think I
only need 30 MB or so for ramdisk.  What I don't have a good feeling
for is how much paging memory is needed at those speed.  Node "simba"
has 4GB of ram and never comes close to using it all but I'm not in
front of the box right now and I can't say what its using right now.
There is no remote access.  (When I walk my dog to the lab later I'll
take a look and get back to you:)

I also run "bonob2", a relay node on an ordinary box --- its on our
lab's ftp server.  Its running at BandwidthRate 50KB with
BandwidthBurst 75KB.  As I write this, ps aux gives RSS of 448 MB and
its  DataDirectory holds about 21 MB.

I would really like to know how these two memory requirements scale
with BandwidthRate.   I'm teaching a course on embedded devices and as
part of our class project we're porting tor-ramdisk to a mips board,
probably the RB433AH.  This sounds like what you're trying to do.

You may want to look at

    http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-ramdisk

    http://opensource.dyc.edu/pub/tor-mipsel-ramdisk/      <- our very
alpha port to a MIPS board

    http://routerboard.com/   <- some of the boards we're looking at


- --Tony Basile



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