Short answer: yes — adding more relays is a reasonable experiment if the host has spare CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. Add ~2–4 relays and allow 2–12 weeks for traffic and bandwidth authority measurements to ramp up and stabilize; there is no automatic increase beyond that.
>From our experience with large numbers of guard relays, the most common limits >beyond host resources are traffic geography first (EU connectivity, a >structural property of today’s Tor network), and bandwidth authority >measurements second. Without strong EU connectivity, relays will struggle to >pass traffic and authorities will observe low throughput, regardless of local >speed tests. Running many relays per IP (e.g., 16) can help only until host or network limits are reached; beyond that, it adds complexity without increasing aggregate throughput. Adding relays will not help once CPU cores or RAM are saturated. Generalization: Guards: ~1 relay per CPU thread, ~3–6 GB RAM per relay Exits: ~1 relay per CPU thread, ~2–3 GB RAM per relay The cost imbalance you’re seeing is expected today: operating relays outside the EU materially improves network diversity, but it can be significantly more expensive per unit of traffic than running relays in EU-dense locations. Best, Tor at 1AEO On Sunday, January 4th, 2026 at 4:32 PM, forest-relay-contact--- via tor-relays <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hello. > > Regarding the very poor performance of forest18 (and a few others), is > there anything that can be done to boost their weights? I have no idea > why the bandwidth authorities are reporting such low performance, since > I get decent throughput to servers in their locations. > > Will the consensus weights slowly increase, or will it be indefinitely > capped? Or should I just spin up 16 relays on each IP? > > It's very discouraging to spend more than $1000 per year on dozens of > diverse VPSes and achieve about the same throughput in total that I get > from a single $9.99/year Black Friday promo VPS in the Netherlands. I > get that the diversity is still useful, but still... > > Regards, > forest
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