I see in atlas that for each exit relay there's the available bandwidth and the currently used bandwidth. My question is, how the available bandwidth is calculated?
I ask that because there's something not clear for me, in fact I run a tor exit relay on one of my gigabit servers (https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/FD233AC55F4618972F9D978801F33E9F87A8CB96) but the actually used bandwidth is always few Mbps (it is running from months, it's not a new one).
It could be two things:
While you have a gigabit capacity, the network measures bandwidth based on the averaging of connections. So it's possible that a group of circuits could use you at gigabit capacity but if you average out the peak usage with the disconnects and non-usage, you won't see it as gigabit. This doesn't explain why it's only a few Mb though.
Also, the system is designed with an algorithm so that just because you have a ton of bandwidth, you won't get more connections. This prevents someone with an extremely large capacity, from collecting the connections of a extremely large percentage of the network.
