New passive performance metrics in Tor

[Nick Mathewson]

On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 7:17 AM, Karsten Loesing
<karsten.loesing at gmx.net> wrote:
 [...]
> 2. Bidirectional use of connections
>
> Björn Scheuermann and Florian Tschorsch of Uni Düsseldorf want to know
> what fraction of connections are used bidirectionally. They suggested to
> count read and written bytes per connection in 10-second intervals and
> classify connections as "below threshold", "mostly reading", "mostly
> writing", and "both reading and writing":

Replying here rather than on
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1819 , since this is
where the discussion of the "bidirectional connection counting"
feature started.  I'm hoping that Björn and Florien (or somebody who
knows their work) will point me at some kind of writeup to explain the
motivation here.  Why is the fraction of "bidirectional" connections
important?  What does knowing it get us?

many thanks,
-- 
Nick