Tor memory usage on embedded systems.

[basile]

Hi everyone,

About a month back I said I would email the list with some measurements
of RAM usage for tor in embedded systems running in the wild.  These
preliminary numbers might be of interest.  Here's what I did.  I ran tor
in a ramdisk environment with only 3 binaries (busybox, tor and
openntpd, statically linked against uclibc) on 1) a i686 box, 4 x
2.80GHz Xeon with 4GB ram (image at
http://opensource.dyc.edu/pub/tor-ramdisk/images/tor.uclibc.i686.20090131.iso) 
and 2) a MIPS board (Mikrotik RB433AH) with a 680 MHz Atheros AR7161 and
128MB ram (image at
http://opensource.dyc.edu/pub/tor-mips-ramdisk/images.ar7161/tor-mips-ramdisk.elf). 
After booting, I waited until the systems established themselves as
relay only and directory server nodes in the network.  I then monitored
ram usage as time went on.  Here's what I found:

1) node "simba" = i686 box with
BandwidthRate 150KB
BandwidthBurst 200KB

Day       Total(MB)     Disk(MB)
7            246               30
9            247               31
12          249               31
16          255               31
19          258               33
21          261               33

Here total = total ram usage including paging and ramdisk, while disk =
ramdisk only (mostly due to DataDirectory files)

I did not systematically measure CPU usage, but it was very small.

2) node "mufasa" = mips with
BandwidthRate 40KB
BandwidthBurst 80KB

Day      Total(MB)
1           45
2           56
3           56
4           56
5           56
6           61
7           56
8           56

Given the different way in which the ramdisk was set up on the MIPS,
there was no easy way to seperate paging from disk memory.

Again, I did not systematically measure CPU, but watching top
occasionally, I never saw loads over 0.1 or cpu usage over 10%.



I realize these numbers are rough and incomplete, but they give a ball
park of what's needed.  I'm going to repeat these measurements, but
would like some feedback from the community regarding what you'd like to
see.

-- 

Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
USA

(716) 829-8197



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