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Gordon,
It seems useful to run obfsproxy bridges on $1 a month VPSs then. Can weather.torproject.org be used to monitor whether they're running or not?
That's a very good question - I hadn't tried monitoring my bridges with it because I had other means. Fortunately, a reboot to a bridge doesn't set it back like it would a relay. Users of the bridge are inconvenienced (maybe) while it's offline, but cheap VPSes are *great* for dedicated bridges, and 128MB RAM is currently enough.
Best, - -Gordon M.
Is there any utility in the very cheap VPSs with 128mb of ram?
I did some testing quite a while ago and found that 256MB was the minimum amount of RAM for a relay. It works for some time with 128MB, but it then runs out of memory, and it is not very good to have it restart all the time.
I say "was" because currently, with more than 3 million clients in the network, a relay might even run out of memory with 256MB RAM. I don't have any current data on that though.
A 128MB VPS can comfortably support an obfsproxy bridge - just get a provider that doesn't reboot you a ton. I've run a number of such bridges.
I would not go below 512MB RAM for a relay that is going to handle more than 2Mbps (about 200KB/sec) - you will eventually run out of RAM and Tor will be killed, and that's not great for the network.
My source for the above is a lot of blood, sweat and tears with Tor on the Raspberry Pi model B. :)
Best, - -Gordon M.