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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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