[tor-bugs] #4486 [Analysis]: Research: should N23 actually help in practice?

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#4486: Research: should N23 actually help in practice?
-------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
 Reporter:  arma                     |          Owner:  robgjansen       
     Type:  task                     |         Status:  needs_information
 Priority:  normal                   |      Milestone:                   
Component:  Analysis                 |        Version:                   
 Keywords:  performance flowcontrol  |         Parent:  #4506            
   Points:                           |   Actualpoints:                   
-------------------------------------+--------------------------------------

Comment(by karsten):

 Replying to [comment:28 karsten]:
 > Replying to [comment:27 arma]:
 > > Karsten, if you're looking for more sims to run, this is a good one.
 You can run it with default config as a baseline (UseN23 defaults to 0).
 >
 > I just started this simulation with the default value for UseN23.

 I'm running into a problem, but it seems that master is to blame here, not
 the n23-4 branch.  There's something wrong with bootstrapping.  None of
 the relays or clients manage to download an up-to-date consensus and relay
 descriptors, and only 76 of the 100 exits (and interestingly, none of the
 non-exits or clients) manage to get the very first consensus published at
 00:05:00.  I stared at the scallion.log files for a bit, but couldn't see
 an obvious reason for the problem.  I uploaded Shadow's data directories
 for the [https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/large-n23-4
 -vanilla-data.tar.bz2 n23-4] and the
 [https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/large-master-
 vanilla.tar.bz2 master] simulation (6.2M each).  I could change the log
 level to info or debug if someone wants to look at those logs, and I could
 manually bisect Tor versions to see when Shadow started being unhappy.
 Not sure if it's relevant, but I had to tweak `src/library/scallion
 /scallion-tor.c` to use `idkey = client_identitykey` instead of `idkey =
 identitykey` to make Shadow compile.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4486#comment:29>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online