Reduced Tor Traffic [was: Re: peculiar server...]

[Lucky Green]

Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 05:15:15AM -0500, Scott Bennett wrote:
>   
> [...]
>>      That brings us back to something I've already posted on OR-TALK, namely,
>> the apparent slowdown in tor traffic that has reduced the traffic through my
>> tor server by at least 30% and, judging from the reduced peaks shown for a lot
>> of the high-volume servers listed on the torstatus page, the tor network at
>> large.
>>     
>
> We're working on plans to start gathering more methodical data about
> how the network has run and is running, with the goal of being able to
> answer questions like this more usefully.
>   
I am very much looking forward to more diagnostic instrumentation in the
Tor network. I am seeing a 30% difference in the traffic through
basically identical servers that are neither bandwidth nor CPU limited
with identical uptimes. Something about the path selection appears to
lead to favor one server over another.

Also interesting to me is the overall reduced amount of traffic over the
last few months that I have been seeing with my middleman nodes. The
most likely explanation is that the overall Tor network capacity is exit
node bound and that middleman nodes have grown disproportionately over
time. Still, it sure would be nice to be able to perform rigorous
analysis on the network.

--Lucky