Hi There This is a pretty interesting topic. I have been running a Rasp Pi 3 based relay since August this year. By now, I am up to about 1,300 incomming and outgoing connections, and a max of >about 21mbps. This is about 50% of the max. upload speed. Consensus weight is between 3,000 and 6,000. The CPU is running at 20% max. However, my local ISP disconnects me after 24 >to 36 hours. From my point of view this is the only disadvantage.

For a home based relay, is that good, bad, or just average? Is there a chance for me to get a stable, or even guard flag? What are your experiances? Mike

My experience is bad, the relay is not taking off at all, I have consensus weight of 19 and am sending less than 20 MB every 6 hours despite having bandwidth measured by Tor of between 70 and 120 KB/s. The total up bandwidth I have in ISP connection is 1.5 mbps and this is probably the issue. I also run this on Pi 3. I did, however, get a stable flag after 5 days, and have had it since then. My IP is dynamic and did not change in these 5 days or in the 4 days that passed since I got the Stable flag. My relay nickname is ZG0.

Based on your experience I think your are doing fabulously well for a home relay, and that what really counts is the ISP bandwidth, and the Stable flag does not have much to do with how much traffic you get. Moreover, your 20% cpu util confirms my opinion that Pi is the perfect, most cost efficient way to run a relay and that running it on a larger computer is a waste of resources and money (up to the point Raspi chokes which we are yet to discover :))

Moreover, clearly Pi’s cpu power will never be the bottleneck, only its memory size. You have a total of 1GB of memory on your Pi 3, what’s your memory utilization? What’s the total traffic the Pi sends every 6 hours (reported in the Tor log file /var/log/tor/notices.log and, for the previous time window, in /var/log/tor/notices.log.1)?

What’s your relay’s nickname?