My question, particularly (but not exclusively) to American Tor node operators is: what factors have influenced your decision to remain a participant in the Tor network? If you have shut down your node, then why have you done so?
Well I am still happy with my tor server in the US. Tor has been running reasonably well lately (minus last week), and after the first round of complaints related to IRC and google when I first started, is hasn't been too much of a problem to deal with.
1. You lose interest in the Tor project.
2. You become disillusioned with the goals of the Tor project.
3. Tor crashes too often to be useful to you personally.
This is what nearly caused me to drop tor. Not because it was crashing, but because it was failing in such a way that it was disrupting other services.
As I reported a while back, tor would slowly (over about a week) increase cpu usage until it became cpu bound, even though the network load hadn't increased. When it starts eating so much system resources that it degrades performance of my other services, that's when it becomes a problem. But after watching it carefully for a while and eventually setting a daily accounting limit cycle, that gives tor a rest most nights and I haven't seen the same problem lately. Tor failed in another strange way last week, but this time with 0% cpu and no network traffic served (the processes were still running, no errors reported). I noticed after 4 days and restarted.
4. Managing an installation of Tor is too difficult to be worth your effort.
5. Your ISP threatens to terminate your Internet access contract if you do not stop running Tor.
6. Blacklisting by Tor-unfriendly Internet resource providers (such as Wikipedia or Google Groups) is unpalatable to you.
My server is remotely hosted, so this hasn't been an issue for me. But this would prevent me from running tor on my home machines.
7. Tor crashed while you were not looking, and you forgot about it or otherwise failed to restart it.
Tor seems more stable lately. As long as it doesn't cause problems for my other (higher priority) services, then I'll just restart it if I notice a problem after a periodic check of the traffic logs.
Valient
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