Installing Simple Bandwidth Scanner

The recommended method is to install it from your system package manager.

In Debian/Ubuntu systems:

sudo apt install sbws

To install also the documentation:

sudo apt install sbws-doc

You might need to check in which releases is the package available.

There is a port for FreeBSD.

Continue reading to install sbws in other ways.

System requirements

  • Tor (last stable version is recommended) To use only exits that implement congestion control, tor >= 0.4.7.4-alpha-dev

  • Python 3 (>= 3.8)

Python dependencies

It is recommend to install the dependencies from your system package manager. If that is not possible, because the Python dependencies are not available in your system, you can install them from their sources. We only recommend using pip for development or testing.

Installing sbws from source

Clone sbws:

git clone https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/sbws.git
git checkout $(git describe --abbrev=0 --tags)

(git describe --abbrev=0 --tags provides the latest stable version which should be used in production)

and install it:

cd sbws
pip install .

Installing sbws for development or testing

If you use pip, it is recommended to use virtualenv, to avoid having different versions of the same libraries in your system.

To create a virtualenv:

virtualenv venv -p /usr/bin/python3
source venv/bin/activate

Clone sbws:

git clone https://git.torproject.org/sbws.git

Install the python dependencies:

cd sbws && pip install -e .

Configuration and deployment

sbws needs destination s to request files from.

Please, see DEPLOY.rst (in the local directory or Tor Project Gitlab) or DEPLOY.html (local build or Read the Docs) to configure, deploy and run sbws.

System physical requirements

  • Bandwidth: at least 12.5MB/s (100 Mbit/s).

  • Free RAM: at least 2GB

  • Free disk: at least 3GB

sbws and its dependencies need around 20MB of disk space. After 57 days sbws data files use a maximum of 3GB. If sbws is configured to log to files (by default will log to the system log), it will need a maximum of 500MB.

It is recommended to set up an automatic disk space monitoring on sbws data and log partitions.

Details about sbws data:

sbws produces around 100MB of data a day. By default raw results’ files are compressed after 29 days and deleted after 57. The bandwidth files are compressed after 7 days and deleted after 1. After 57 days, the disk space used by the data will be up to 3GB. It will not increase further. If sbws is configured to log to files, logs will be rotated after they are 10MB and it will keep 50 rotated log files.