[tor-dev] Using Shadow to increase agility of Sponsor R deliverables

[Rob Jansen]

Hi David, Roger,

I think it would be great if we could show off some HS performance improvements at the next Sponsor R PI meeting in January, both as a way to show that we are making progress on the performance front and also to help demonstrate our agility and how quickly we can get results on new designs. I’m here to advocate the use of Shadow to help in this regard.

So far, the list of deliverable that we could possibly show improvements is quite small:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/SponsorR#Tickets

From the list of completed tickets, the only one that stands out to me as providing a performance boost is #13211 (Allow optimistic data on connections to hidden services):
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13211

This seems like a somewhat small change; despite that, do we think this may be something worth simulating to verify it works as expected and understand the extent to which it reduces time to first byte for HS downloads?

Are there other HS performance improvements that we think may be ready by January?

Best,
Rob