[tor-dev] Summary of meek's costs, December 2014

[David Fifield]

Here's the summary of meek's CDN fees for December 2014. Earlier reports:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-August/007429.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-October/007576.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-November/007716.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December/007916.html

If you're just tuning in, meek is a pluggable transport introduced a few
months ago. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek.

            App Engine +  Amazon + Azure = total by month
February 2014    $0.09 +      -- +    -- =    $0.09
March 2014       $0.00 +      -- +    -- =    $0.00
April 2014       $0.73 +      -- +    -- =    $0.73
May 2014         $0.69 +      -- +    -- =    $0.69
June 2014        $0.65 +      -- +    -- =    $0.65
July 2014        $0.56 +   $0.00 +    -- =    $0.56
August 2014      $1.56 +   $3.10 +    -- =    $4.66
September 2014   $4.02 +   $4.59 + $0.00 =    $8.61
October 2014    $40.85 + $130.29 + $0.00 =  $171.14
November 2014  $224.67 + $362.60 + $0.00 =  $587.27
December 2014  $326.81 + $417.31 + $0.00 =  $744.12
--
total by CDN   $600.63 + $917.89 + $0.00 = $1518.52 grand total

Usage was up in December compared to November, but the relative increase
wasn't as great as between November and October.

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?graph=userstats-bridge-transport&start=2014-10-01&end=2014-12-31&transport=meek
(The last few days are missing; see
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December/008021.html.)

Rather than attach bandwidth screenshots from the CDN control panels,
this month I'll just link to the Globe pages for the different backends.
A different relay is used depending on what backend you choose:
  meek-google: https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/88F745840F47CE0C6A4FE61D827950B06F9E4534
  meek-amazon: https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/3FD131B74D9A96190B1EE5D31E91757FADA1A4F3
  meek-azure:  https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/AA033EEB61601B2B7312D89B62AAA23DC3ED8A34
It's interesting that meek-google has more bandwidth (800 KB/s) but
fewer clients (200), while meek-amazon has less bandwidth (550 KB/s) but
more clients (340). meek-azure is behind both with 200 KB/s and 150
clients. I also attached screenshots of the bandwidth graphs from those
pages.

As a step toward reducing the bandwidth bills, this month I closed
#12778, which reduces overhead by ensmallening HTTP headers.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12778
Headers are now less than half the size compared to before, which I
estimate will save about 3% on bandwidth. We won't observe any effect,
however, until there's a new release of Tor Browser.

We're starting to move quite a bit of traffic. Not counting meek-azure,
it's over 3.6 TB last month. (That's including an estimated 6–7% of
meek-induced overhead.)


== App Engine a.k.a. meek-google ==

Most of the App Engine bill is still using an existing credit. Of the
total of $326.81, $230.00 was covered by credits.

Here is how the costs broke down:
	2132 GB             $255.86
	1419 instance hours  $70.95
The attached meek-google-costs-2015-01-01.png shows the breakdown of
costs between bandwidth and instance hours for the last few months.


== Amazon a.k.a. meek-amazon ==

Asia Pacific (Singapore)	105M requests	$126.52	 783 GB	$101.09
Asia Pacific (Sydney)		183K requests	  $0.23	   1 GB	  $0.18
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)		 25M requests	 $30.28	 146 GB	 $17.83
EU (Ireland)			 57M requests	 $68.81	 481 GB	 $37.23
South America (Sao Paulo)	  1M requests	  $2.49	   7 GB	  $1.58
US East (Northern Virginia)	 19M requests	 $18.69	 161 GB	 $12.39
--
total				207M requests	$247.02	1579 GB	$170.30*

* The total from adding up subtotals is $0.01 higher than the actual
  bill, I think because of some rounding.


== Azure a.k.a. meek-azure ==

I still can't figure out how to get total monthly bandwidth out of the
Azure console.


David Fifield
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