On Mon, May 23, 2022 at 12:18:41PM +0200, Marco Predicatori wrote:

the graph shows a marked difference between written bytes per second and read bytes per second om 2022-05-19 and 2022-05-20. In any other day the bytes are roughly the same. What might my node have "written" on those two days?

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A4E74410D83705EEFF24BC265DE2B...

A common answer here is that your relay is serving more directory information than usual -- directory answers count as "written" bytes but they don't have corresponding "read" bytes.

Indeed, that seems to be the case for you this time. Taking a look at your extrainfo descriptor from that time period (attached to this mail for posterity, but also you can find it on https://collector.torproject.org/ or via a query on your DirPort if you had one open):

published 2022-05-20 23:28:07 write-history 2022-05-20 13:47:42 (86400 s) 52641878016,29257544704,29532297216,34634562560,121750598656 read-history 2022-05-20 13:47:42 (86400 s) 52190178304,28933199872,29611094016,31570991104,33742606336 dirreq-write-history 2022-05-20 13:47:42 (86400 s) 258335744,326073344,385689600,3712866304,87401081856 dirreq-read-history 2022-05-20 13:47:42 (86400 s) 18748416,468201472,756950016,882057216,1235405824

So yes, it is just that one day, where you pushed 121GBytes but only received 33GBytes. And the dirreq lines explain why -- they show on that last day that your relay served 87 gigs of directory info, while only fetching about 1 gig of it.

More details on those extrainfo lines here: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt#n1191

Now, this leads you to a new question, which is "ok but why was I serving so much directory information on that day?" -- and I don't know the answer. We've had a series of mysteries over the past years where a whole lot of Tor clients appear and each bootstrap. Your mystery is a pretty small one in scale compared to these others. I guess the summary is "some users, for some definition of users, did that."

--Roger

Hi,

the graph shows a marked difference between written bytes per second and read bytes per second om 2022-05-19 and 2022-05-20. In any other day the bytes are roughly the same. What might my node have "written" on those two days?

could be directory answers. Or being chosen as hsdir for popular onion services.

https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/A4E74410D83705EEFF24BC265DE2B...

Thanks, Marco

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