# Standalone Snowflake proxy consumes huge traffic
**URL:** https://forum.torproject.org/t/standalone-snowflake-proxy-consumes-huge-traffic/7409
**Category:** Relay Operator
**Tags:** snowflake
**Created:** [April 25, 2023, 1:35pm UTC](https://forum.torproject.org/t/standalone-snowflake-proxy-consumes-huge-traffic/7409 "2023-04-25T13:35:45Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@solids](https://forum.torproject.org/u/solids)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2023, 1:35pm UTC](https://forum.torproject.org/t/standalone-snowflake-proxy-consumes-huge-traffic/7409/1 "2023-04-25T13:35:46Z")
I’ve run Snowflake proxy on my VPS for about 4 days, and below is my bandwidth statistics:
From `iftop` and `tcptrack -i eth0` I can see over 140 connections to`[2a0c:dd40:1:b:0:0:0:42]:443`, which is the IP of `snowflake-01.torproject.net`, and network speed to this IP is usually very high (about 500KB/s). So I assume Snowflake contributes to this statistics a lot.
You can see in the first days, traffic is not only big but increasing, that’s because Snowflake sometimes exits itself for a while and I’m deploying Systemd “restart” policy, to run it 24 hours per day.
However, don’t you think the traffic is too big? Running Snowflake 24 hours a days consumes about 100 GB traffic, though Snowflake itself says it’s just no more than 10GB in logs.
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### Author:  [@dcf](https://forum.torproject.org/u/dcf)
#### Post date: [April 25, 2023, 3:27pm UTC](https://forum.torproject.org/t/standalone-snowflake-proxy-consumes-huge-traffic/7409/2 "2023-04-25T15:27:53Z")
Thank you for running a Snowflake proxy. The high bandwidth usage is not abnormal. If you want to limit or reduce it, you can try different settings of the [`-capacity` command-line option](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/blob/5dd0a31d95052eca7e89cef8ccc527b74a1c6be5/proxy/README.md#running-a-standalone-snowflake-proxy). The default is unlimited; you might try `-capacity 10` and adjust from there.
The (currently) two Snowflake bridges together transfer 100 GB about every 2 minutes, on average. So while 100 GB in 24 hours for one proxy seems like a lot, it is still just a small part of total Snowflake traffic.
I’m sorry that the proxy is crashing and restarting. It is probably a bug in resource management. You can read more at the below thread and issue:
> [@Anyone experiencing problems with Snowflake proxy?](https://forum.torproject.org/t/anyone-experiencing-problems-with-snowflake-proxy/6938):
>
> I run about 30 Snowflake proxies on various IP addresses. They are all docker containers and generally each proxy gets about 360-400 connections per hour and relaying an average of 1GB per hour. They’ve been running mostly smoothly until recently. For the past few days, They have started to consume a huge amount of RAM and I’m getting huge spikes in CPU. They consume all the RAM I give them whether it be 1GB or 7GB of RAM and start crashing and restarting one by one. What’s interesting is that…
> **[fix(proxy): memory leak (#40243) · Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship...](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40243)**
>
> According to this forum post and the one below it, Snowflake proxy appears to start at 100MB RAM consumption and goes up to...
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### Author:  [@solids](https://forum.torproject.org/u/solids)
#### Post date: [April 26, 2023, 4:25am UTC](https://forum.torproject.org/t/standalone-snowflake-proxy-consumes-huge-traffic/7409/3 "2023-04-26T04:25:00Z")
Thanks. The `-capacity` option seems very helpful.
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### Author:  [@system](https://forum.torproject.org/u/system)
#### Post date: [April 27, 2023, 4:25am UTC](https://forum.torproject.org/t/standalone-snowflake-proxy-consumes-huge-traffic/7409/4 "2023-04-27T04:25:05Z")
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