Installing Simple Bandwidth Scanner

The recommended method is to install it from your system distribution.

In Debian/Ubuntu systems:

sudo apt install sbws

To install also the documentation:

sudo apt install sbws-doc

Continue reading to install sbws in other ways.

System requirements

  • Tor
  • Python 3 (>= 3.5)
  • virtualenv (while there is not stem release > 1.6.0, it is recommended to install the required python dependencies in a virtualenv)

In Debian:

sudo apt install tor python3 virtualenv

Python dependencies

To install the Python dependencies, create a virtualenv first

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

Clone sbws:

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

Install the python dependencies:

cd sbws && pip install .

sbws needs destination s to request files from.

Please, see ./DEPLOY.rst (or /DEPLOY.rst or Deploying Simple Bandwidth Scanner) to configure, deploy and run sbws.

System physical requirements

  • Bandwidth: at least 20MB/s (160 Mbit/s). The more the better.
  • Free RAM: at least 1.5GB
  • Free disk: at least 3GB

sbws and its dependencies need around 20MB of disk space. After 90 days sbws data files use around 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 10 days and deleted after 90. The bandwidth files are compressed after 7 days and deleted after 1. After 90 days, the disk space used by the data will be aproximately 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.