Re: [tor-relays] Appropriate bandwidth limits for my home relay

[krishna e bera <keb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13-09-05 10:50 AM, Nick wrote:
> Hi all,

Hi Nick,
I didnt see any replies to your message so i hope you havent gone away
disappointed.

> After running my relay for a bit on my home connection I found that
> Tor would happily consume all the bandwidth available, which
> (coupled with the number of connections overwhelming my home router,
> I suspect) caused my internet connection to be unusable for other
> things.

Yes whenever your upload bandwidth is saturated everything will slow to
a crawl.

The FAQ says upgrade firmware or get a new router if the router is crashing
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorFAQ#Mycabledslmodemkeepscrashing.Whatsgoingon
but that is unlikely the case on a low speed home connection like yours.

> 
> So I set the RelayBandwidthRate and RelayBandwidthBurst values to 20
> KBytes, as 20KBytes/s is a reasonable amount of bandwidth I can
> spare (total upload bandwidth on the connection is around
> 50KBytes/s). However now atlas.torproject.org shows an average of
> only around 0.5 - 1.5 Kbytes/s usage, and says the advertised
> bandwidth is 10 Kbytes/s.

Note that the manual entry for BandwidthRate
https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en
says it needs to be at least 30 KBytes, if you want your relay to be used.

> Should I increase the RelayBandwidthRate value to more than I can
> comfortably provide, on the basis that it isn't likely to all be
> used? Or should I just relax and let the network use my relay as
> little as it likes?

If you increase it to more than your connections provides, Tor circuits
will not perform as well as the clients are expecting.  You may be
interested in the BandwidthBurst entry which you could set to 50KBytes.
See also the wiki entry on bandwidth shaping
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorFAQ#WhatbandwidthshapingoptionsareavailabletoTorrelays

> Sometime quite soon my home internet connection will get much
> faster; I'm aware the relay is of questionable value at present
> bandwidth levels, but they should increase in not too long.

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