Running tor relay on a MIPS board (Re: setting up a TOR relay)

[basile <basile@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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The Doctor wrote:
> Maurizio Lombardi wrote:
>
>> Considering the fact that my bandwidth is limited to 30 Kb/s (240
>> Kbps) can it works with just 64 Mb of RAM? (Maybe limiting the
>> number of connections?)
>
> I have been trying to run a Tor node on 64 MB of RAM, and it does
> not seem to work well.  Tor stays up for two or three hours and
> then dies silently.  I've been trying to debug it for a few weeks
> now and I don't know if it's a memory limitation or the same bug
> that's been discussed in at least one other thread on this mailing
> list.
>
>> What about 128 Mb of RAM?
>
> No idea.  Post if you give it a try, I'm interested in your
> results.
>
Since my last post, I fixed some annoying problems I was having
running tor embedded in a MIPS arch --- actually tor was fine, but
there were issues with linking busybox and configuring the kernel.
So, I've now pretty much ported my little environment (tor-ramdisk) to
MIPS and I'm running a relay only tor node "mufasa".  Its running in
QEMU but as soon as I get my board, I'll move it over.   Its status
can be seen here:

 
http://torstatus.kgprog.com/router_detail.php?FP=449a610341fa08c0d8c11a2309ef7313b3721451

The biggest question we've had is how much RAM does tor need in these
embedded environments.  Eg. I believe Kyle Willams who built JanusPA
used 256MB.  The answer to this question will depend on how you are
using tor: client only (like JanusPA), relay only, exit.  I'm going to
try to address this question systematically for a relay-only node.
I'll plot RAM and cpu usage versus BandwidthRate on mufasa for a few
points.  I'll further break down the RAM between ramdisk versus paging
memory.  Since the emulated environment is probably not the place to
do this reliably, I'll have to wait until my board comes.  I'll also
proceed carefully. eg. leave a relay up for a week before tweaking the
bandwidth.  This will give me good statistics and also cause minimal
disruption to the tor network itself.

For what its worth, here's the current usage after running about 12
hrs: ramdisk 13.8 MB, paging 50.6 MB = total 64.4 MB

The mips branch of tor-ramdisk can be obtained here

    http://opensource.dyc.edu/tor-mipsel-ramdisk

BTW, I noticed a lot of downloads after my first post while I was
still changing files on the archive so you may want to redownload to
get the latest.  I've frozen the binaries for mufasa as release 20090125.


Any wishlist or caveats before I do my little experiment?

- --

Anthony G. Basile, Ph.D.
Chair of Information Technology
D'Youville College
Buffalo, NY 14201
USA

(716) 829-8197

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