tor relay traffic

Some people seem to assume that tor relays push a constant amount of traffic, but this is far from the truth. Each client individually decides which relays to use, and the sum is something pretty noisy.

This is the traffic on my faster relay (set to 7MB), and the actual traffic is still ragged, and has some longer-term excursions. It is new, and just became a guard node.

This is the other one, with a traffic limit five times lower, more that correspondingly less traffic, and because there are fewer circuits running through it, the traffic is even more ragged and bursty. This relay also slowly loses traffic; this seems to be a trend these days for lower-traffic relays.

Note the logarithmic Y scale that makes the fluctuation less prominent. In linear scale the one peak in this graph would scale the entire rest down far to the bottom.