[tor-dev] Tails vs the capacity of the Meek bridges

[David Fifield]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2020 at 11:51:41AM +0100, anonym wrote:
> tl;dr: if Tails makes it too easy to use Meek bridges, could it overload the current set of Meek bridges?

The default meek bridge is already overloaded, unfortunately. Users
complain that even though it works, it is too slow. Reports of 20 KB/s
are typical. See for example this recent comment from China:
https://bugs.torproject.org/33219#comment:9
> ...with the pre integrated meek bridges I just had 20 kb/s, at most
> 30, sometimes even lower than 20. So it took me over one hour to
> download the browser.

Here's the brandwidth chart for the default meek bridge btw. I would
guess that the bridge is capable of going faster, but it may have a
BandwidthRate set to keep costs from getting out of control.
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/8F4541EEE3F2306B7B9FEF1795EC302F6B84DAE8

It's possible to set up a special bridge just for Tails users. It
requires setting up a bridge with meek-server (this is the cheap part)
and configuring a CDN to point to it (this is the expensive part). But
then you can let it run as fast as your budget allows.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#MicrosoftAzure
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Howtorunameek-serverbridge