[tor-dev] Proposal 281: downloading microdescriptors in bulk

[teor]

> On 12 Aug 2017, at 03:36, Nick Mathewson <nickm at torproject.org> wrote:
> 
> Filename: 281-bulk-md-download.txt
> Title: Downloading microdescriptors in bulk
> Author: Nick Mathewson
> Created: 11-Aug-2017
> Status: Draft
> 
> 1. Introduction
> 
>  This proposal describes a ways to download more microdescriptors
>  at a time, using fewer bytes.
> 
>  Right now, to download N microdescriptors, the client must send
>  about 44*N bytes in its HTTP request.  Because clients can request
>  microdescriptors in any combination, the directory caches cannot
>  pre-compress responses to these requests, and need to use less
>  space-efficient on-the-fly compression algorithms.
> 
>  Under this proposal, clients simply say "Send me the
>  microdescriptors I need", given what I know.
> 
> 2. Combined microdescriptor downloads
> 
> 2.1. By diff
> 
>  If a client has a consensus with base64 sha3-256 digest X, and it
>  previously had a consensus with base64 sha3-256 digests Y then
>  it may request all the microdescriptors listed in X but not Y,
>  by asking for the resource:
>      /tor/micro/diff/X/Y
> 
>  Clients SHOULD only ask for this resource compressed.
> 
>  Caches MUST NOT answer this request unless they recognize the
>  consensus with digest X, and digest Y.
>  digest Y.

Extra "digest Y.  "

>  If answering, caches MUST reply with all of the
>  microdescriptors that the cache holds that were listed by
>  consensus X, and MUST omit all the microdescriptors that were
>  omitted listed in consensus Y.

What happens if the consensus versions are different?
In particular, what happens if the microdesc algorithms are different
in these consensus versions?

(What should happen is that the diff is larger than normal, because
most microdesc hashes have changed. We should have a test for this.)

> 2.2. By consensus:
> 
>  If a client has fewer than NMNM% of the microdescriptors listed in a
>  consensus X, it should fetch the resource
>      /tor/micro/full/X
> 
>  Clients SHOULD only ask for this resource compressed.
> 
>  Caches MUST NOT answer this request unless they recognize the
>  consensus with digest X. They should send all the microdescriptors
>  they have that are listed in that consensus.
> 
> 2.3. When to make these requests
> 
>  Clients should decide to use this format in preference to the
>  old download-by-digest format if the consensus X lists their
>  preferred directory cache as using a new DirCache subprotocol
>  version. (See 5 below.)

Don't clients have 3 preferred directory caches?

What about fallback directory mirrors?

We don't care about diff/X/Y - there is no previous consensus.
But knowing when a fallback supports full/X could be handy.
Or do we deliberately want to use the legacy protocol to
bootstrap, so a single cache can't lie to us?

What about bridge clients?
Can they find out from the bridge descriptor?

> 3. Performance analysis
> 
>  This is a back-of-the-envelope analysis using a month's worth of
>  consensus documents, and a randomly chosen sample of
>  microdescriptors.
> 
> 
>  On average, about 0.5% of the microdescriptors change between any
>  two consensuses.  Call it 50.  That means 50*43 bytes == 2150
>  bytes to request the microdescriptors.  It means ~24530 bytes of
>  microdescriptors downloaded, compressed to ~13687 bytes by zstd.
> 
>  With this proposal, we're down to 86 bytes for the request, and we
>  can precompute the compressed output, making it save to use lzma2,
>  getting a compressed result more like 13362.
> 
>  It appears that this change would save about 15% for incremental
>  microdescriptor downloads, most of that coming from the reduction
>  in request size.
> 
>  For complete downloads, a complete set of microdescriptors is about
>  7700 microdesciptors long.  That makes the total number of bytes
>  for the requests 7700*43 == 331100 bytes.  The response, if
>  compressed with lzma instead of zstd, would fall from 1659682 to
>  1587804 bytes, for a total savings of 20%.
> 
> 
> 5. Compatibility
> 
>   Caches supporting this download protocol need to advertise
>   support of a new DirCache subprotocol version.

T
--
Tim Wilson-Brown (teor)

teor2345 at gmail dot com
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