[tor-project] The tor network is constrained by.... (meek, exits, etc)

[David Fifield]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 05:11:12PM +0100, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> > Firstly, while we don't have (public) datasets showing this, I am 
> > fairly certain that the public meek bridges have their bandwidth 
> > capped (to limit costs) and raising that cap would directly
> > improve the speed of meek users. (Implying that the bottleneck the
> > majority of the time is the meek transport.)  Right?
> 
> That's also my intuition, but I don't have the data you're looking
> for.  David would know better.

You can probably look for some patterns in past bandwidth history and
compare them to the history of rate limit changes at
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Users

Active bridges:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/AA033EEB61601B2B7312D89B62AAA23DC3ED8A34 meek-azure
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/F4AD82B2032EDEF6C02C5A529C42CFAFE516564D meek-amazon (after November 2015)
Defunct bridge fingerprints:
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/3FD131B74D9A96190B1EE5D31E91757FADA1A4F3 meek-amazon (before November 2015; #17473)
https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/88F745840F47CE0C6A4FE61D827950B06F9E4534 meek-google (before May 2016)

For example, take
 * 2015-10-02 Rate-limited the meek-azure bridge to 1.1 MB/s. (Azure grant expired.) 
and you can see a matching drop in bandwidth from 2.5 MB/s to 1.1 MB/s
on the same date. Also,
 * 2016-01-14 Increased meek-azure rate limit to 3 MB/s.
 * 2016-01-16 Increased meek-amazon rate limit to 3 MB/s. 
is really visible in the bandwidth graphs.