However, your Relay Search page (metrics.torproject.org) now says the
speed is only just "XXX KiB/s"! (X is a number)
(also)
Q1. Where are you measuring this from?
That number is self-reported by your server. IIRC it's the peak speed it has "recently" reached. It's not /directly/ used by the network but it does influence how your speed is measured (more on that in a bit).
If your relay is fresh it can take a while for it to get enough traffic for that number to reach capacity. If you want to get there faster, one trick is to use it as a vanilla bridge (routing all your traffic through it). If you then peak at e.g. 20Mbit/s when using it, it will report something around that. You can also just wait for it to get enough traffic organically.
Q2. If the Advertised BW is just this low, doesn't my Tor relay won't
be used at all?
The number that's actually used for deciding how much each relay gets used is the consensus weight. It's mostly determined by how fast sbws thinks your relay is. Your advertised bandwidth is used to figure out which relays should be used for the test[1] - it tries to use relays at least twice as fast as your reported bandwidth.
Thus, if your advertised bandwidth is low, you might get unlucky when your bandwidth is measured and end up bottlenecked by some slow relays. /Might/. Even then, since it aims for twice your reported bandwidth, your weight should slowly raise over time anyways.
[1] How sbws works — sbws 2.2.0 documentation
The actual consensus bandwidth is the median result from the 5 bandwidth authorities. You can check the results from the last consensus on https://consensus-health.torproject.org/. I've actually been checking that myself, because the bwauths seem to not like my new relay (AstralGoatHerbie) a whole lot, with the weights jumping by literal orders of magnitude back and forth. I assume this will stabilize as my relay gets older.
I don't worry about it too much, tbh.
How about teaming up with speedtest servers to measure real network
value?
By the way, AFAIK the bandwidth authority system is designed such that relays don't know when they're being measured - otherwise bad actors could fool it into measuring more bandwidth than they actually have.
···
On 10/19/25 01:26, am via tor-dev wrote:
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