[tor-relays] Re: Relay suddenly stopped relaying traffic but is still in the consensus

[Roger Dingledine via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Oct 04, 2026 at 11:46:17PM +0000, forest via tor-relays wrote:
> Yesterday, one of my relays suddenly (within minutes) went from passing
> about 5 Mbps to passing nothing. The traffic rate dropped off as rapidly
> as if it went into hibernation. The consensus still says it is up. Nyx
> does not show any indication of failures and all directory authorities
> are able to reach its ORPort. There's no network censorship occurring as
> far as I can tell (my other relays can reach its ORPort). Nothing is out
> of place in the logs, but Nyx still reports an average rate of 1 KB/sec.
> Why is this? The relay is 0EF2A357140FCBDAE2F948CC2228909695B81B35.

That relay currently has only 4 votes for the Fast flag, out of the 9
directory authority votes:

$ curl -s https://www.freehaven.net/~arma/moria1-v3-status-votes|grep -A2 103.174.51.65 |grep ^s
s Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Fast Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Fast Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Fast Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Fast Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Running Stable V2Dir Valid
s Running Stable V2Dir Valid

(Normally I would point you at
https://consensus-health.torproject.org/#relayinfo for a web
interface way of exploring the votes, but with our gitlab
problems lately that page is having problems keeping updated:
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/tpa/team/-/work_items/42828)

Not getting the Fast flag is because your consensus weight is quite
low, which in turn is because the bwauths think you are underperforming
compared to other relays that advertise a similar speed:

$ grep -A5 103.174.51.65 v3-status-votes|grep ^w
w Bandwidth=698 Measured=230
w Bandwidth=698
w Bandwidth=698
w Bandwidth=698
w Bandwidth=698 Measured=81
w Bandwidth=698
w Bandwidth=698 Measured=120
w Bandwidth=698 Measured=64
w Bandwidth=698 Measured=72

So, I don't know why it might have dropped off a cliff all at once,
but that would certainly explain a drop over the course of an hour.

Since you're right around the threshold for Fast, I wouldn't be surprised
if you wobble back and forth between being Fast (and getting some traffic)
and not being Fast (and getting basically no traffic).

--Roger

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