[tor-talk] Meek bridges request

[David Fifield]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 09:09:43PM +0000, МΞYΞЯ - Meyer wrote:
> I've been testing the Tor Browser Bundle with meek, and it worked fine
> (really, it's actually the only way to bypass a proxy system in a
> place that I am every day), because it supports the use of HTTP/S
> proxy. But, here (in Brazil) at least, we're experiencing a too slow
> connection with the default meek's bridge  (when the Tor had worked
> normally, it was so fast). If anyone have a faster meek bridge, please
> share, we here are needing of one! (sorry for my bad english)

Thank you for testing meek, and I'm sorry it's slow for you.
Unfortunately it's not something you can fix by using a different bridge
address. meek doesn't really use bridge addresses--your first hop is
always to App Engine, and I suspect that accounts for most of the
latency from Brazil.

I can't offer you any advice for improving the speed right now, but I
can show you two things we're working on to make it faster.

We're going to try some web services other than App Engine, which might
provide better performance in different parts of the world. These ideas
aren't deployed yet, but we have some notes here:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#Webservices

More importantly, we're going to extend the meek protocol so that
requests and responses don't have to be strictly serialized. How it
works now, is that if you have two pieces of data to send, you can't
send the second one until the first one has been sent, and a response
received. It causes a delay that increases the farther away you are from
App Engine, even if you have fast bandwidth. It will be better when the
protocol allows you to send more than one piece of data at a time.

David Fifield