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Not enough exit nodes? (was Re: more letters from the feds)



On Jan 27, 2007, at 11:12:01, patgus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Problem still exists though, that Tor needs more exit nodes. If nobody is
willing to run an exit server the performance of the network suffers
dramatically. I personally find the performance of the network to be
almost unusable, so I choose other pay-for anonymity services. This is
not a bash of Tor or its design, but as we all know there are simply not
enough servers running to handle the amount of clients.

Pardon me if this has been answered, but has it been shown for sure that the major cause of Tor's slowness is lack of exit nodes? Anecdotally, I seem to find Tor's bandwidth to be adequate, but latency is a greater problem. I seem to remember someone recently saying that a lot of the slowdown is from slow encryption/decryption processing on server nodes, be they exit or middlemen.


If the problem is not bandwidth, would more servers help, or do we need faster servers (as in CPU speed)? Perhaps the latency is simply something that cannot be avoided, since it seems to me connections over Tor are going to have at least triple the latency of a direct connection.

In any case, I don't think more servers hurts the network (though query if it brings down the average speed of the network), so the generic response letter suggested by patgus would probably be a good idea.

/jgt
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