[tor-relays] Re: Relay forest18 is still not on the consensus

[forest-relay-contact--- via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hello.

Tor at 1AEO wrote:
> Short answer: yes — adding more relays is a reasonable experiment if
> the host has spare CPU, RAM, and bandwidth.

Unfortunately, while there is plenty of remaining bandwidth and the CPU
is nowhere near saturated, memory is a limiting factor. Most of these
low-performance relays have only 1 GiB RAM. When combined with zswap and
a lighter kernel, my fastest 1 GiB relays can achieve about 150 Mbps.
But the overhead of running multiple relays caused by all the extra non-
swappable kernel memory needed for conntrack tables, socket structures,
etc., causes the memory pressure to rapidly bring down the system.

Hopefully there will be improvements to bandwidth measurement techniques
in the future for relays which _do_ have good connectivity to Europe.
Until then, I've just been adding I2P routers, which use up ~25x more
bandwidth than Tor on the slower relays (3 Mbps vs 120 Kbps) and uses
much less resident memory.

> 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.

How does the improved diversity help if effectively no one is passing
traffic through my relays?

Is there any way I can estimate the maximum consensus weight that I will
be able to achieve with a particular AS in a particular location if no
one else is already using it? Many of the poorly performing relays I
have actually have decent connectivity to the EU, without any single AS
or IXP being a bottleneck for all traffic.

Regards,
forest
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