Short answer: yes — adding more relays is a reasonable experiment if the host has spare CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. Add ~2–4 relays and allow 2–12 weeks for traffic and bandwidth authority measurements to ramp up and stabilize; there is no automatic increase beyond that. >From our experience with large numbers of guard relays, the most common limits beyond host resources are traffic geography first (EU connectivity, a structural property of today’s Tor network), and bandwidth authority measurements second. Without strong EU connectivity, relays will struggle to pass traffic and authorities will observe low throughput, regardless of local speed tests. Running many relays per IP (e.g., 16) can help only until host or network limits are reached; beyond that, it adds complexity without increasing aggregate throughput. Adding relays will not help once CPU cores or RAM are saturated. Generalization: Guards: ~1 relay per CPU thread, ~3–6 GB RAM per relay Exits: ~1 relay per CPU thread, ~2–3 GB RAM per relay The cost imbalance you’re seeing is expected today: operating relays outside the EU materially improves network diversity, but it can be significantly more expensive per unit of traffic than running relays in EU-dense locations. Best, Tor at 1AEO On Sunday, January 4th, 2026 at 4:32 PM, forest-relay-contact--- via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Hello. > > Regarding the very poor performance of forest18 (and a few others), is > there anything that can be done to boost their weights? I have no idea > why the bandwidth authorities are reporting such low performance, since > I get decent throughput to servers in their locations. > > Will the consensus weights slowly increase, or will it be indefinitely > capped? Or should I just spin up 16 relays on each IP? > > It's very discouraging to spend more than $1000 per year on dozens of > diverse VPSes and achieve about the same throughput in total that I get > from a single $9.99/year Black Friday promo VPS in the Netherlands. I > get that the diversity is still useful, but still... > > Regards, > forest
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