How much bandwidth does a Tor exit relay use, and can it fill 10 Gbps?

How much bandwidth does one Tor exit instance use?

One tor instance is single-threaded for its heavy crypto work, so its throughput is capped by one CPU core. The Tor Project's relay requirements, read on 1 November 2026, put it at about 400 to 450 Mbit/s in each direction on a modern CPU with AES-NI. Check for aes in /proc/cpuinfo; the processors in every Ravenquay berth have it.

An exit sends roughly as much as it receives, so its average rate sets its monthly traffic. A fast exit, above 100 Mbit/s, also handles more than 100,000 concurrent connections, which is why a datacenter machine and not a home line is the right place for one.

How much data does that move in 30 days?

The figures below are arithmetic, not a measurement: data equals the average rate times 2,592,000 seconds, divided by 8, with 1 TB counted as 10^12 bytes. They are averages over a 30-day period, not peaks.

Can one exit fill a 10 Gbit/s port?

No, not from a single server as we sell it, and the limit is the IP address, not the port.

The Tor Project caps a public IPv4 address at eight tor relays. Each Ravenquay berth includes one dedicated IPv4. Eight instances at about 450 Mbit/s each come to roughly 3.6 Gbit/s each way, so one IPv4 tops out well below a 10 Gbit/s port. To fill 10 Gbit/s you would need about 22 instances (10,000 divided by 450), which means roughly three IPv4 addresses, more than the one we include. These are estimates, and Ravenquay does not promise additional IPv4 addresses.

On a Ravenquay berth, the IPv4 relay limit and per-instance throughput bound a Tor exit long before the port does. The 10 Gbit/s port of Harbor 10G still gives an exit all the headroom it can use, with none of it spent on a monthly quota: Unmetered means no monthly traffic quota and no overage bill: the port speed of your plan, 1 or 10 Gbit/s, is the only limit. Each server has one dedicated IPv4 address and an IPv6 /64.

Does the RAM or the traffic quota get in the way?

Neither on a Ravenquay berth. The Tor Project asks for at least 1.5 GB of RAM per exit instance. Eight instances need 12 GB, well inside the 128 GB DDR5 ECC of Harbor 10G and the 64 GB DDR4 ECC of the smallest berth.

Traffic is the usual ceiling elsewhere, but not here: an unmetered port has no monthly quota and no overage bill. If you still want a cap, the Tor Project's bandwidth FAQ uses RelayBandwidthRate for the average rate and AccountingMax with AccountingStart day 00:00 for a daily byte budget.

How do those numbers sit against the whole Tor network?

Modestly, which is the point of diversity. Per metrics.torproject.org, read on 1 November 2026 with data to 29 October 2026, the Tor network had about 9,220 running relays, roughly 2,750 of them flagged as exits, and about 1,210 Gbit/s of total advertised bandwidth. Relays carrying the Exit flag advertised around 386 Gbit/s of that.

A single berth's practical exit capacity, about 3.6 Gbit/s each way on one IPv4, is under 1% of the network's exit-flagged bandwidth. That is a useful contribution in a location the network is short of, not a bottleneck you need to worry about overrunning.

Exit-friendly hosts are scarce as well. Ravenquay checked 34 dedicated-server hosts on 30 October 2026: 4 allowed Tor exit relays, 1 more after a ticket, and 8 banned them.

How fast will a new exit actually run?

Not at full speed on day one. The Tor Project explains that a new relay's consensus weight ramps up over time: it gets almost no traffic for the first few days while bandwidth authorities measure it, then climbs over weeks. Plan for days, not minutes, before an exit reaches its capacity.

Start with the reduced exit policy. The Debian torrc manual says ReducedExitPolicy 1 allows about 65 ports while blocking most, which cuts abuse mail and keeps BitTorrent users off your exit. Tor's default exit policy already rejects port 25, and so does Ravenquay: Port 25 is closed for outgoing mail on every server, permanently, to keep spam off the network; ports 465 and 587 toward mail providers stay open For the full setup, read what you need to run a Tor relay.