[tor-dev] Progress on hidserv-stats Metrics integration, request for code review

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Mar 12, 2015 at 06:01:13PM +0000, George Kadianakis wrote:
> Karsten Loesing <karsten at torproject.org> writes:
> > The question is, what graphs do we want on Metrics?  How about:
> >
> >  - Total hidden-service traffic in Mbit/s (per day, using weighted
> > interquartile mean, like lower graph on page 1 of the PDF)
> >
> >  - Unique .onion addresses (per day, using weighted interquartile
> > mean, like upper graph on page 1 of the PDF)
> >
> >  - Fraction of relays reporting hidden-service statistics (containing
> > both dir-onions-seen and rend-relayed-cells, like page 3 of the PDF)
> 
> I think these are indeed the essential graphs here. Let's proceed with
> these for now!

Sounds great. I'm really excited to see these graphs up on the metrics
page.

That said, for the "total hidden-service traffic" one... we want to know
that, but we also want to know what fraction that is of total traffic,
yes? I could imagine a graph with total hidden-service traffic and also
with total traffic; but then the smaller curve will be around y=0 and not
easy to see. What would you all think about a graph that is estimated
fraction of total traffic that is hidden-service traffic, instead of
graph #1 above?

> > Note that I left out "fraction of traffic", because we can't guarantee
> > that our many assumptions we made for the blog post will hold in the
> > future.  Happy to be convinced otherwise.

Oh. Yes, this is exactly the same question. Hm. I think the "number of
hidden-service related bytes" is going to go up over time, and make it
really easy for people to mis-conclude "hidden-service related bytes
are getting to be more of Tor's traffic" which is not what that means.

Which assumptions from the blog post do you think are going to become
less right in the future? Because I'd much rather have the graph that
tells us the answer to the research question.

> I think a new tab on metrics called "Advanced" with such research
> graphs would be helpful. Maybe.

We could also imagine a cron job somewhere that generates the graphs
somewhere (e.g. people.tp.o), and an "advanced" link from the hs metrics
page to those graphs. To make it clearer that it's informal and not
something we'll necessarily include forever.

--Roger