Re: [tor-talk] Performance

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 03:18:23PM -0500, Joe Btfsplk wrote:
> The Privoxy part of the chain could be an issue.  What is your
> reason for using Privoxy?
> In general, I find Tor to be faster overall, since overhauls in
> TorBrowser - when they stopped using Privoxy (& likely started other
> speed increasing methods).
> Other network changes could be partly responsibility for increased speed.

Privoxy will be slower for two reasons:

A) It doesn't do the pipelining, etc that your browser can do. Earlier
versions of privoxy would fetch the whole page before passing any of
it to the browser. Maybe newer versions of Privoxy are smarter, but I
bet there are still web performance features that it disables by adding
another link in the chain.

B) It doesn't make use of Tor's "optimistic data" feature, which sends
the first chunk of application-level data along with the begin cell,
effectively cutting out one of the two round-trips for a new page fetch.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3890#comment:11
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/181-optimistic-data-client.txt
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torbrowser.git/blob/HEAD:/src/current-patches/firefox/0027-Use-Optimistic-Data-SOCKS-variant.patch

I guess the broader question is what the original poster was trying
to do -- if the goal is to give Tor's protection to everybody in the
organization, and the way they did it was to leave everybody using
Internet Explorer, and then redirect outgoing traffic into Privoxy
which sends it through Tor, then the users are missing out on all
the application-level privacy and security features that Tor Browser
gives you:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

--Roger

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