[tor-dev] OnionOO protocol questions

[Norman Danner]

On 8/4/12 1:45 AM, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> Hi Norman,
>
> On 8/3/12 9:42 PM, Norman Danner wrote:
>> If I understand the weights documents correctly, there is no one
>> consensus weight for a given router.  What exactly is the ordering we
>> should use when the request asks to order by consensus weight?
>>
>> It seems like determining the consensus weights of the selected relays
>> could be a relatively slow process, because at least with the
>> filesystem-backed approach we are using right now, each individual
>> weights file has to be opened and read.  Is this correct, or am I
>> missing something here?
>
> Ordering by consensus weight (or any other field) is independent of the
> returned document type, like weights documents.  The fact that weights
> documents contain consensus weight histories doesn't change that.  You'd
> order by the latest known consensus weight of a relay.  You don't have
> to open and parse all the weights files for that, which would be a
> performance disaster.
>
> The way how the current Java Onionoo works is that we do the filtering
> and ordering only based on the summary helper file.  The result is an
> ordered list of fingerprints.  Only in the last step we look at the
> requested document type and fetch documents from disk by fingerprint.
>
> The Python Onionoo should probably do the same thing but using a
> database.  There would be a single database table that can be used to
> filter and sort results.  Those results can then be joined with document
> tables by fingerprint to fetch all the JSON strings to return.

This is the structure I was imagining we would follow.  Thanks.

	- Norman

-- 
Norman Danner - ndanner at wesleyan.edu - http://ndanner.web.wesleyan.edu
  Department of Mathematics and Computer Science - Wesleyan University