[tor-dev] Scalability or Onionbalance for v3 ephemeral/ADD_ONION services

[George Kadianakis]

Chad Retz <chad.retz at gmail.com> writes:

> A quick glance at the code shows that ADD_ONION (i.e. "ephemeral"
> onion services) doesn't support setting an Onionbalance
> frontend/master onion address (specifically
> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/32709 doesn't seem
> to have a control-side analogue). Would a feature request for adding a
> `*(SP "OnionbalanceMasterKey=" OBKey)` (or "OBMasterKey" or whatever)
> to ADD_ONION be reasonable? If so, just add in Gitlab?
>

Hell Ched,

that's indeed something that is missing and a reasonable feature
request. A spec/code patch would be particularly welcome ;)

> Also curious alternative scalability and load balancing options for
> ephemeral v3 onion services. I have read
> https://www.benthamsgaze.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/sucu-torscaling.pdf
> but unsure if anything more recent has been written. Beyond that and
> Onionbalance, any other interesting approaches I could employ
> (assuming I can dev anything from a control port pov, but am wanting
> to work w/ an unmodified Tor binary)?
>

Another complementary approach is to split the 'introduction' and
'rendezvous' functionalities to different hosts:
             https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/proposals/255-hs-load-balancing.txt
However it hasn't been implemented yet...

Cheers!