What are the minimum system specs to run a Tor Bridge Relay?

Support Relay Operator
1

I’m looking for the cheapest & most power efficient laptop/Chromebook to run a Tor Bridge Relay. I read that something stronger than a Raspberry Pi should be used for better stability so what are the minimum specifications? The guide here doesn’t mention them.

Update: I found a laptop with an Intel Core i5-3320M 2.6GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM, and 500GB HD storage. Would this be enough to run 24/7 a Tor Bridge Relay, Tor Snowflake, and to some extent BOINC? (I would limit BOINC’s resource usage to some extent so that it doesn’t interfere with the Tor relay).

1 Like
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If my ThinClients can handle any of the above requestes (Relay / Bridge / Snowflake Proxy) i am sure your laptop will do a great job.

[1] Stick to a solo purpose Relay / Bridge / Proxy don’t mix them on the same machine/ip

[2] I don’t know how will work this mix hence BOINC is CPU hungry and might affect TOR performance but i guess with fine tunning and various test it will work.

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I don’t know about BOINC requirements, but for a bridge or snowflake is a good hardware!

Requirements:
Memory ram: at least 512 MB
Bandwidth: Ideally a relay runs on an unmetered plan or includes 2 TB/month or more.
Disk: 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.

4

If I have Orbot hosting snowflake on an Android device and sometimes it’s connected to the same network that the bridge would run on, what could I do to not have the two services share the same IP?

5

I have Snowflake on my PC, works well, I like seeing the number of people I’ve helped each day .
Because of this, I wanted to use one of my Androids to run Orbot as a relay or even Snowflake but read the relay isn’t really worth it (on phone that is). It won’t use mobile data and my internet is unlimited (the article said it was less safe and would eat up data)
So I just wanted to ask someone here that is more knowledgeable than Joe Shmoe from web search results, is it actually a waste of my time and efforts to try and use Orbot somehow to help this community?
Cuz I sure would like to.

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Where did you read that? I thought that running a bridge relay from most devices, even an RPi, would be useful to the network? I’ve been running one on a Raspberry Pi 400 for a while now, and granted it doesn’t see much traffic due to a metered connection and limited upload/download speeds, but still…