Re: tor and its speed

[George Shaffer <George.Shaffer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Glymr suggested using the Fasterfox extentsion. 

On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 12:18, sigi replied:
> Thanks for all this hints! Now I use fasterfox, and it really gives 
> some more performance. 

Part of the description for Fasterfox states: "Dynamic speed increases
can be obtained with the unique prefetching mechanism, which recycles
idle bandwidth by silently loading and caching all of the links on the
page you are browsing."

Something like this is ideal for a dial-up connection which really does
have periods of idle bandwidth. There you don't slow anyone else down by
using this, though if enough people used such "accelerators," the wasted
bandwidth would have some effect on the net.

On a system that's already slow due to limited _shared_ bandwidth, there
is no idle bandwidth. Prefetching all the links on a page in the hope
that the next one you read will already be ready and waiting for you is
just plain selfish. Every fetched page that you don't look at is totally
wasted bandwidth. You are getting your pages faster, at someone else's
expense. If everyone did this, it would be self-defeating, and the Tor
network would likely become completely unusable. Depending on your
browsing habits, a product like this could increase your total consumed
bandwidth by 2 to 10 times.

Please reconsider using Fasterfox, or any prefetching product, on the
Tor network.

George Shaffer