[tor-talk] Tor relay data usage

[Justin Aplin]

On 4/12/2012 3:57 PM, Anthony Papillion wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Am 12.04.2012 05:16, schrieb Anthony Papillion:
>>> So i set up a Tor relay a few hours ago (around 3:30, it's 10:15 now)
>>> and, so far, it's used about 700mb of traffic (about 350 up and
>>> down).Is this normal or do I need to tweak something?
>> Do you want more or less traffic? What are your current setting of the
>> various BandwidthRate options?
> Well, right now, I'd like it to use less. Mostly because I'm on an AT&T DSL line and capped at 100gb of traffic before they charge me more. Right now, Tor looks like it's on track to use ~1gb a day which is only ~30gb a month but I'm not sure I want it to use that much all the time.
> My bandwidth is set to>1.5 so I assume I just need to bring that down and I'll be good to go, right?
> Anthony 		 	   		

There are two ways to do this, either by capping the average bandwidth 
that Tor uses to relay, or by setting the relay to go into hibernation 
after a certain amount of data has been relayed. Assuming you only want 
Tor to use about 30GB of data per month, you could set 
"RelayBandwidthRate 12 KB" in your torrc; although this isn't a strict 
cap, Tor will automatically average out bandwidth usage for relayed 
traffic to this rate. Alternatively, you can set "AccountingMax 30 GB" 
and "AccountingStart month 1 0:00" in the torrc, which will cause Tor to 
stop relaying traffic after using 30GB of data in a 28-day period, 
without limiting the bandwidth within that period. You can also set both 
as a safety measure, although it's a bit redundant.

Since 12 KBps is sort of a sad rate for a relay, I'd probably go the 
second route in your case and just set a monthly accounting limit, 
leaving the rate uncapped unless Tor is interfering with your normal 
internet activities (in which case, I'd set it to, say, 80% of your 
provider's advertised bandwidth, or whatever else you find appropriate, 
which will limit Tor enough to leave your internet connection usable, 
but still run up against the limit set by AccountingMax eventually).

~Justin Aplin