Hi forest, Great idea! Tor prints most of its relay counters even when they’re zero, so your curl/`sed` command captures most of what is needed. The additional lines are the onion-service metrics and the signing-certificate expiry metric, which requires OfflineMasterKey 1 and a loaded signing certificate. We’ve written up the source checks and included a downloadable Tor 0.4.9.15 dictionary covering all 37 metric families. Testing shows add this dictionary produces 34–36% smaller Tor MetricsPort archives using zstd default level 3. Around 50% savings using same dictionary with zstd level 19, taking more compression (and decompression) time. https://1aeo.com/blog/tor-metricsport-zstd-dictionary.html https://1aeo.com/blog/data/tor-metrics-dict-0.4.9.15.txt On Friday, September 11th, 2026 at 10:34 PM, forest via tor-relays <tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hello. > > In order to analyze the ongoing DDoS attack, I'm collecting metrics data > from my relays. It's a lot of data so I'm compressing it with zstd. I > need a "dictionary" containing a typical metrics output in order to get > a better compression ratio. The best I have comes from: > > curl -s 127.0.0.1:9035/metrics | sed 's/ [0-9]*$//' > dict > > This creates a decent dictionary with sensitive information (the actual > sample values themselves) removed. But from what I understand, Tor only > outputs metrics that are relevant, so a relay that doesn't also host an > onion service will never have a line starting in "tor_hs_", for example. > > I'm looking for a sample containing all possible metrics strings, as if > Tor did not remove entries that are unrelated to its current state. It > doesn't seem like the source code contains anything like that in one > easily-accessible location. Does anyone know where I can get this? > > Regarding the privacy issue of storing metrics data, the relay will be > automatically encrypting it with a public key so the relay itself never > retains more than a few minutes worth of sensitive data in memory. The > metrics will only be used to try to learn more about the ongoing DDoS. > > Regards, > forest
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