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Comment by vocatus_gate | Hacker News Reader

As a heavy user of Syncthing for the Tron project ( https://reddit.com/r/TronScript ) I'm excited to see how well Syncthing is doing, and really appreciate the hard work from the devs. We spun up a Syncthing node to distribute the project after Resilio Sync (formerly "BT Sync") put a hard cap on the number of nodes that were allowed to connect.

Keep up the great work, team!

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For those with some spare CPU cycles and bandwidth you can give back to the project by running a relay server.

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/strelaysrv.html

Eg that VM running a DNS adblocker, from another front page article :)

I created a Docker syncthing relay image[0][1] to enable quick deployment to put on some of my servers with extra bandwidth and memory (alot (>500) of connections quickly exhausts a cheap 512MB instance doing other things and the OOM killer runs).

What I find most shocking is that somehow my instance (in SF via DigitalOcean, surprise) is the only relay[2] on the West coast the majority of the time. How is that? It also is one of the busiest relays by connection count showing that plenty of people in the Bay Area are selecting it likely due to latency.

Checkout more relay stats: http://relays.syncthing.net/

[0] https://github.com/kylemanna/docker-syncthing-relay

[1] https://hub.docker.com/r/kylemanna/syncthing-relay/

[2] http://relays.syncthing.net/

What's the drive or motivation behind people running syncthing discovery & relay servers?

Do they generally then run their own clients to only use their own servers?

With Tor I'm convinced over the "speech should be free, I'm making the world a better place" type argument.

With syncthing I'm incredibly impressed that this optional (but incredibly useful) infrastructure is being run by people for free since it doesn't quite make the world a better place in the same way? It just saves a bunch of other people setting up their own relay/discovery server on a cheap linode/aws instance?

Impressed!

I think people just want to help others, and do something useful with their spare resources. I run a relay on a server on my home internet connection, so it doesn't cost me anything.

> I think people just want to help others, and do something useful with their spare resources. I run a relay on a server on my home internet connection, so it doesn't cost me anything.

Same. The devs the contribute their time to build syncthing, the least I can do to help their (our?) cause is to spend 10-60 minutes to setup a relay and spend 5 minutes to babysit it every other month.

What are the system requirements for running a relay server? And is there any easy way to configure traffic quotas?

You don't really need anything except a fast enough internet connection. The relay page [1] has some stats about that. And there are various configuration options, see the documentation [2].

[1] http://relays.syncthing.net/ [2] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/strelaysrv.html#strelaysrv

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