On the performance scalability of Tor

[Steven Murdoch]

A frequently stated problem with Tor is the poor performance and
improving this is the goal of several sub-projects. One of these is to
simply encourage the deployment of more Tor servers. This will
increase the capacity of the network, but the consequent improvement
to users is more difficult to estimate.

The intuitive hypothesis -- that a n% increase in network capacity
will result in an n% increase in performance for users -- is almost
certainly wrong. In fact, the defining factor is how the number of
users scales with the available bandwidth -- a currently unknown
function.

I discuss this way of looking at Tor as well as the consequences and
limitations of the approach in a blog post published today:

 http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/07/18/economics-of-tor-performance/

As always, comments and suggestions, either here on the list or on the
blog, are appreciated.

Steven.

-- 
w: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/sjm217/
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