Re: New user question about Directory mirroring & bittorent

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 05:05:45PM -0800, NATHANIEL HOMIER wrote:
> "Uncomment this to mirror the directory for others (please do)"  This 
> line seems to make me feel guilty about asking if it's okay to not 
> mirror the dir in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage.  Only to keep my 
> line responsive.  Basically I just want to serve the tor users without 
> mirroring the dir.  I suppose if you really need the help I could keep 
> it uncommented But I would rather not.  So okay to comment out?

Thanks for the prod. I've just changed the lines in the torrc.sample to:

## Uncomment this to mirror the directory for others. Please do
## if you have enough bandwidth: see the bottom of
## http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#LimitBandwidth

It's fine to leave it commented out. I've just been working on some
ways to let you serve copies of the directory *sometimes* as long as you
don't do it so often that it hurts your connections. Stay tuned for the
0.1.1.14 release.

> Also I want to continue using my torrent client Azureus.  Obviously not 
> on the tor network.  How well do the tor server and torrent play 
> together concerning bandwidth.  Would I need to adjust the 
> BandwidthRate, BandwidthBurst of 50KB down some to make adjustments for 
> torrent.  I plan on reducing the upload bandwidth for torrent to 
> something like 10KB to 20KB down from the current 56.7KB now and the 
> download rate would  get a limit of 200KB maybe more maybe less 
> depending on what you guys say.

The only answer I can give is to play around with it until you're happy.
Tor will play pretty well with other network applications. You might have
a problem if you have a really crappy cable modem or router though --
sometimes they can only handle a few connections at a time before they
start to get cranky.

--Roger