I’m currently looking at expanding my tor relay family with an almost 1 Gbps residential link. What hardware would the community recommend? From what I’ve seen from some previous posts, an SBC won’t cut it. What would be best with okayish power efficiency? Is there anything else to consider such as do I need to upgrade the router to be able to handle the number of connections which would happen at such speeds?
I believe the official documentation from Tor Project already covered the hardware requirements pretty clearly.
If you’re aiming for 1Gbps, your relay hardware needs a NIC that supports GbE (copper twisted pair or fiber) at least 1GB RAM and a CPU with AES instruction set, which could be hard for many SBCs to reach.
First, some SBCs advertise they have a NIC that supports GbE, but their NIC is attached to USB2.0 hub which limit the network speed this NIC can offer. Second, AES instruction set are commonly seen on desktop CPUs, but many SBCs use low end CPUs that may not support AES instruction set. It doesn’t have to be a Intel or AMD, but you may need to check if your SBC supports AES instruction set. See link 1 2(CPU section). (Note: AESNI is the name of AES instruction set on Intel/AMD processors, AES instruction set on ARM processors (which are common on SBC and IoT devices) have different names, but the instruction to check if the processor supports AES instruction set is correct).
Also yes, you need to upgrade your router. Lower-end consumer grade routers are pretty much all shit and cannot handle large volume of concurrent connections (for a 100M+ relay you need to be aming for like 100k+ concurrent connections), consider buying a high-end consumer grade router or a router for small business.