On Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:21:42 +0000 Matthew Harrold tormailinglist@marrold.co.uk wrote:
I have ran a couple of Tor Relays now for a few months, one was steady and reliable, and providing about 2MB/s of bandwidth. Of late, its slowed down dramatically. A reboot resolved it temporarily, but its slowed right down again, below 500KB/s. You can see the graph here- https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/2DAEE4EBA687A517F8B473894341A56820CDDC...
Does anyone have any suggestions? I have checked with my ISP and they are not throttling or managing the traffic in anyway, and my CPU and RAM isnt under heavy load.
Hello,
It looks like your node got the "Guard" status - google around for what that means, or wait for someone to explain. When that happens, your traffic drops significantly, and it can take weeks or months till it recovers to initial levels, if it ever will at all.
Personally I don't agree with the theory behind "Guards", and it is highly annoying that there is no way to prevent nodes from becoming Guard. The only way to drop that status seems to be nuking the whole /var/lib/tor/keys/ directory and restarting tor; this has the same effect as if you have just started a new node. Needs to be done every couple of weeks, but getting back to expected traffic levels takes at most 3-5 hours after that each time.