[tor-talk] status of Tor's speed issues?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 07:45:15AM +0100, Martin Kepplinger wrote:
> So I'm giving a little talk about Tor, mainly to motivate and remind
> people to run a relay. Roger gave a talk a few years back, about
> congestion control, the problem with bulk-vs-web traffic and the "1 sec
> token bucket" problems. Is there a short answer on whats the status on
> these topics?

Some of them are resolved, and some of them remain as theoretical
issues. It turns out that the distance between the green line and
the purple line in this graph:
https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html?graph=bandwidth&start=2010-12-17&end=2014-03-17#bandwidth
is way more influential on performance than we had realized. That is,
we can mask many of the underlying technical questions by having enough
capacity in the network.

But it remains the case that too much bulk traffic can really hose the
network, so it's still the case that people shouldn't do that.

I haven't gotten around to organizing everything into a "Why else is
Tor slow" document, to go with the first one:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/why-tor-is-slow
But you can read some notes here:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/roadmaps/Tor/Performance
http://freehaven.net/~arma/tor-performance-outline.txt

In that last URL I tag five promising directions with '*'. With some work,
you can find papers corresponding to most of them at
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/

> Btw. Would anyone send some stickers to give away to austria? The talk
> is in the beginning of May.

Sounds like a great cause. You should mail Kelley and see if she can
help you.

Thanks,
--Roger