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Re: [tor-relays] Does Tor work with Intel QAT acceleration



Two suggestions:

1)  Run speedtest (https://www.speedtest.net) from behind your firewall and verify your actual bandwidth (or at least get a good approximation <smile>).

2)  Check the brand of NIC in your current machine.  Intel NICs are reportedly much more efficient than RealTek for handling large number of packets - which is why they are recommended for most firewall machines.  Suspect that logic would apply for a Tor Relay as well.

Suspect you also want a CPU with AES-NI support.  Check the specs on the web, AES-NI should be called out.  "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep aes" will also tell you if your running some flavor of linux.

Kevin

ps. Dig around on the web for firewall hardware recommendations. I know I've seen some tables on throughput for pfsense, shouldn't be too hard to find and might throw some light on the situation.

pps.  Very jealous of your connectivity!

On 4/10/2022 2:32 PM, Andreas Bollhalder wrote:
Hi all

I have my first Tor relay up und running. It's currently installed on a little desktop computer with an Intel i5 9500T CPU. My Internet connection is 10Gb/s symetric. From this bandwidth, I would be able to spend a good part for supporting the Tor network.

With that little machine, it seems that it would max out at somewhere at ~30 MBytes/s. For my definitive Tor relay hardware, I'm currently researching some options, which would be capable of handling Tor traffic at the rate of 200 to 300MBytes. Even it would be used nowadays, but who knows whats coming in the future and I hope this relay would last 5 years ore so.

It looks to me, that with a normal CPU, it's impossible to reach my goal. But then I encountered, that Intel has the Quick Assist Technoloy (QAT) integrated in some of their products (ie. Atom C3xx8). This QAT can be used with OpenSSL as a hardware accelerator for encryption. There also exist dedicated PCIe cards with QAT (ie. Netgate CPIC-8955).

Searching the Internet, I couldn't find any information if QAT would be helpful with Tor. But Tor uses the OpenSSL library and this can use the QAT acceleration. Is there anyone who has tried this und can share his expirience?

Thanks in advance
Andreas

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