[tor-talk] Tor users from Finland jumped from 25 000 to 200 000

[David Fifield]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:58:22PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 14, 2022 at 05:38:14AM +0200, Markus Ottela via tor-talk wrote:
> > The creation of the Onion Service uses tempfile to create a temporary
> > directory each time a new Onion Service is spin up, but as per the log
> > files, there was only 25 Onion Services created during that time.
> 
> Restarting tor multiple times with a fresh tempdir each time would make
> you appear as multiple clients. If you ran 25 copies of the script, then
> you would be counted as 25 clients, since each instance of tor would be
> making its own separate directory requests. But I don't know if that's
> enough to explain the large effect on the estimated number of users. It
> depends on how often the scripts were restarting tor. The user counts
> are built on the assumption that a tor client makes a directory request
> every 144 minutes, on average. If the script restarted tor more
> frequently than that, it would be counted as more clients than 1. But to
> count as even 10,000 clients, each of the 25 script instances would have
> to be restarting tor every 144*60*25 / 10000 = 21 seconds on average.

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 06:09:24PM +0200, Markus Ottela via tor-talk wrote:
> Again I'm not sure that's what this is about, but both the start time, and
> the most recent major downtime spikes match. I've killed testing, let's see
> if it returns to normal; I think there's enough data to open a ticket about
> my issue anyway.

The user counts are still elevated, with data points through 2022-01-16.
If you stopped testing on 2022-01-13, it must not have been the main
cause.

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2021-10-21&end=2022-01-19&country=fi