Requirements for Tor relays depend on the type of relay and the bandwidth they provide.
If you don't meet the requirements to run a Tor relay or obfs4 bridge, running a Snowflake proxy is a great way to donate your bandwidth to help users circumvent censorship.
Bandwidth and Connections
A non-exit relay should be able to handle at least 7000 concurrent connections.
This can overwhelm consumer-level routers. If you run the Tor relay from a server (virtual or dedicated) in a data center you will be fine.
If you run it behind a consumer-level router at home you will have to try and see if your home router can handle it or if it starts failing.
Fast exit relays (>=100 Mbit/s) usually have to handle a lot more concurrent connections (>100k).
It is recommended that a relay have at least 16 Mbit/s (Mbps) upload bandwidth and 16 Mbit/s (Mbps) download bandwidth available for Tor. More is better.
The minimum requirements for a relay are 10 Mbit/s (Mbps).
If you have less than 10 Mbit/s but at least 1 Mbit/s we recommend you run a bridge with obfs4 support.
If you do not know your bandwidth you can use http://beta.speedtest.net to measure it.
Monthly Outbound Traffic
It is required that a Tor relay be allowed to use a minimum of 100 GByte of outbound traffic (and the same amount of incoming traffic) per month.
Note: That is only about 1 day worth of traffic on a 10 Mbit/s (Mbps) connection.
More (>2 TB/month) is better and recommended.
Ideally a relay runs on an unmetered plan or includes 2 TB/month or more.
If you have a metered plan you might want to configure tor to only use a given amount of bandwidth or monthly traffic.
Public IPv4 Address
Every relay needs a public IPv4 address - either directly on the host (preferred) or via NAT and port forwarding.
The IPv4 address is not required to be static but static IP addresses are preferred.
Your IPv4 address should remain unchanged for at least 3 hours (if it regularly changes more often than that, it does not make much sense to run a relay or bridge there since it takes time to distribute the new list of relay IPs to clients - which happens only once every hour).
Additional IPv6 connectivity is great and recommended/encouraged but not a requirement.
There should be no problem at all with this requirement (all commercially available servers come with at least one IPv4 address).
Note: You can only run eight Tor relays per public IPv4 address.
If you want to run more than eight relays you will need more IPv4 addresses.
Memory Requirements
- A <40 Mbit/s non-exit relay should have at least 512 MB of RAM available.
- A non-exit relay faster than 40 Mbit/s should have at least 1 GB of RAM.
- On an exit relay we recommend at least 1.5 GB of RAM per tor instance.
Disk Storage
Tor does not need much disk storage.
A typical Tor relay needs less than 200 MB for Tor related data (in addition to the operating system itself).
CPU
- Any modern CPU should be fine.
- It is recommended to use CPUs with AESNI support (that will improve performance and allow for up to about ~400-450 Mbps in each direction on a single tor instance on modern CPUs).
If the file
/proc/cpuinfo contains the word aes your CPU has support for AES-NI.
Uptime
Tor has no hard uptime requirement but if your relay is not running for more than 2 hours a day its usefulness is limited.
Ideally the relay runs on a server which runs 24/7.
Reboots and tor daemon restarts are fine.
Tor Version
For security reasons, Tor relays should not downgrade their tor version from a supported to an unsupported version of tor. Some unsupported versions are insecure. Relays that attempt to downgrade to an insecure version will be rejected from the network automatically.
