Traffic disbalance and overload

Support Relay Operator
1

Maybe my question relates to [tor-relays] reply to: 5 to 10 times more outgoing than incoming traffic

Not sure if it is related to Bridge is overloaded

My node may run for several days without issues. Sent and received traffics are almost identical.

Once it gets “HSDir” mark, very soon memory consumption rises from about 1GB to 3-5Gb, it shows incoming and outgoing traffics disbalance (~35000/~7000 or ~8000/~39000 instead) which may last for several hours. As soon as I do systemctl restart tor my node return to normal state, traffic drops and later I watch HSDir mark disappeared.

What is going on ? Am I doing something wrong ?

2

HSDir can be disabled on a relay with the following added to “torrc”:

DirCache 0

While this will likely stabilize the relay and mitigate directory traffic overload, it will mean that the relay will not become a guard.

3

Thank you for pointing the setting “DirCache 0”. May be I shall try it.

But is it normal behavior for a node in general ? Why does it happen ?

There is another PC under the same real IP address which works as a guard and not published. It does not cause such problem.