[tor-relays] BWauth no-consensus state in effect

[starlight.2015q3@xxxxxxxxxxx]

At Tue Aug 4 20:16:17 UTC 2015 by Jannis Wiese mail at janniswiese.com
>Strange thing: My relay [0] is speeding up since then 
>significantly (finally!!)

That's because with no BWauth quorum the consensus
algorithm reverts to using self-measured bandwidth
with a ceiling of 10000.

This causes the weight super-fast relays to drop
substantially and provides a corresponding boost
to middle and slower relays.  Also puts most of the
450 Unmeasured=1 relays back in the game.

In addition, this state eliminates all the
crazy-stupid-buggy behavior of the BWauths that
has been vexing operators so much.  Only losers
are the folks with huge bandwidth + CPU + tweaking
in their relays, but the drop is not all that
terrible.

I've been watching this for two-plus days now and
the Tor network rather runs better this way.
Looks like no more than 50-100 relays are in the
category where the weight is cut substantially,
and plenty of unused capacity exists in the other
3000 or useable relays to make up the difference.

Unfortunately the BWauths will likely be back
due to the problem of adversarial gaming of the
self-measure values.  Even with a cap of 10000
someone will figure out ways to abuse the old
pre-2009 approach of balancing the network.

One can only hope that enough of the bugs have
been worked out that BWauths will be behaving
better going forward.

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