[Tor-BSD] experiences with tuning BSD boxes for Tor?

[George Rosamond]

René Ladan:
> Hi,
> 
> I was running a non-exit relay node on a Raspberry Pi B running FreeBSD
> at home but last week it seems to have crashed under the load.
> 
> Short config:
> - Raspberry Pi B, 496 MB RAM, 100 Mb/s ue0, 700 MHz
> - FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE-armv6
> - 35 Mb/s down / 4 Mb/s up DSL line
> - Tor bandwidths (normal/burst) set to 500 kB/s
> 
> Does anyone have some tips on what (if any) kernel parameters to set?
> The default kern.ipc.somaxconn value of 128 seems to low for any real
> traffic, but 32768 deprives the kernel of any mbufs in just 20 minutes.
> 
> It might be that a RPI is just too small to be a reliable relay...
> 
> See also
> https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2014-October/005625.html
> 

Curious about other details in your build.  Did you use Crochet?

I have been playing with BeagleBones (b & w) and RPis as Tor relays for
a long while.  I haven't put focus on sysctls because it's almost a
secondary issue to me in terms of other questions.

ue (RPI) and cpsw (BB) seem to be slowly getting somewhere, but I get
regular hiccups with cpsw.

Are you using md(4) and/or tmpfs(5) for mounts like /tmp /var/tmp and
/var/log?

Any details on the load?  Even heartbeat information would be nice to see.

There's some decent stuff on tweaking sysctls on FreeBSD out there, but
there isn't anything centralized.  I know eadler@ and a few others had
the discussion before.  And the overhauls for the 10- branch are
significant in terms of networking performance.

g