[tor-dev] Statistics on fraction of connections used uni-/bidirectionally

[Rob Jansen]

On Dec 18, 2013, at 4:51 AM, Karsten Loesing wrote:

> Hi Rob, Florian,
> 
> thanks for your replies!  If you say these statistics may still be
> useful, then let's leave them in!
> 

Great!

> I just worked on a slightly better visualization of the available data.
> The idea is that the most interesting piece of information, AIUI, is
> what fraction of connections is used bidirectionally; whether the rest
> is used mostly for writing or reading doesn't really matter.  

Perhaps your are correct for the original reason for collecting this data. But actually, I find it very important and interesting that connections tend to have bursty writing more often than bursty reading!

> I also
> aggregated observations similar to Torperf measurements, by plotting
> only median and interquartile range.  Here's the result:
> 
> https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/connbidirect-2013-09-19-2013-12-18.png
> 
> The old graph containing the same data is still there:
> 
> https://metrics.torproject.org/performance.html?graph=connbidirect&start=2013-09-19&end=2013-12-18#connbidirect
> 
> Do you like the new graph?  Do you have further ideas for improving it?

I do like the new graph, its much cleaner than the old one. But I like the mostly reading/writing parts of the old one too. Maybe we can create two more graphs like the new one (1 for mostly reading and 1 for mostly writing). I also think a stacked percentage area graph (e.g. http://www.highcharts.com/demo/area-stacked-percent) could work here, as a way to get all the data on the same chart.

> 
> This graph is only there to show what kind of data we have.  If somebody
> is really interested in the data, they'll have to download the CSV file
> and do their own analysis.  Here's the specification of the file format:
> 
> https://metrics.torproject.org/stats.html#connbidirect
> 
> All the best,
> Karsten
> 

If the main goal is to show the data that exists, I think the old graph does that fine. But I think an important subgoal is also to have graphs that make it clear how the data is useful, not only that it exists. Perhaps keep both/all versions?

Best,
Rob