0

Heyho,

I'd like to run several Tor bridges on vservers. Operating system will be Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 amd64). Does someone have experience with how much RAM I'll need? The 512MB vservers cost 30 - 50 % more than 256 MB vservers, so I'd like to go with 256 MB if it is enough. I want to run just one instance of Tor on each vserver in combination with pyobfsproxy (includes obfs2 and obfs3) serving on one IPv4 and one IPv6 address.

Is it worth to compile Tor yourself in order not having to use glibc?

Answers highly appreciated!

2 Answers 2

1

I'd imagine it would depend on how much traffic is passing through the bridge. Does your vServer provider offer the ability to upgrade? If so, go for the 256mb server and if it's struggling, move up to the 512mb option. You didn't mention how much bandwidth the box will have so it's difficult to tell how much work it will be doing. If you need to upgrade later, you should be able to migrate your settings across fairly easily if they provide you a new host. If they simply upgrade your memory then there shouldn't be any issues at all. Hope this helps.

1
  • Well that's the next thing I don't know for sure. I have seen offers ranging from 200GB to 2TB traffic / month (combined up- and download). I guess your suggestion to try it with 256MB and upgrade if necessary is good. The only bad is I can't really test the performance of the tor, but I guess as long as there's some RAM free it should be okay.
    – meow
    Feb 6, 2013 at 11:03
0

Two bridges (x86_64, statically linked, one bridge on each of 2 IP addresses) run comfortably in 256MB on CentOS/x86_64. This is with traffic up to 1024GB/month.

That said, it is best to have some swap space available for atypical operation (e.g. installing OS updates, etc.) On VPSs with only 256MB and no swap I have to kill one of the bridges for yum/rpm to work their update magic.

You will need more memory if running Obfsproxy, especially if it is linked statically. I can't be more specific because I am just getting started with Obfsproxy.

Regarding the build: It is definitely worth compiling/linking yourself, but not for glibc. You can't link glibc statically because libpthreads just will not link statically. The benefit of linking against zlib/openssl/libevent is that you can use the current versions of those libraries, rather than whatever your distro provides. (Even the latest CentOS6 version, released 2 weeks ago, has obsolete versions of all 3 packages.) And you especially want the latest openssl for its speed and AES improvements. Plus, compiling yourself lets you fully utilize the instruction set of your CPU.

One more thing. You wrote "vserver". If this is just shorthand for VPS, then you can ignore what follows. If you meant VServer virtualization, I would urge you to use another, any other, virtualization method. (E.g. Xen, KVM, VMWare, etc.) Mostly because ip{6}tables and certain system config variables will not be available to you in this not-really-virtualized-at-all environment.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .