[anti-censorship-team] Snowflake bridge operations

[Linus Nordberg]

David Fifield <david at bamsoftware.com> wrote
Wed, 17 Jan 2024 10:46:28 -0700:

> So with 3 bridges (and assuming the 3 bridge lines are fully distributed
> to all Snowflake clients; i.e. including Tor Browser and Orbot), then we
> would expect each bridge to receive 1/3 or traffic. But that raises the
> question of why does the current snowflake-02 get only about 25% of what
> snowflake-01 gets? I don't know--for a long time I though it was because
> snowflake-02 had not been properly released in Orbot, and so a large
> fraction of clients only knew about the snowflake-01 bridge, but it's
> been a while and that should no longer be the case. It may have
> something to do with a more limited network uplink on snowflake-02. That
> host and uplink, too, are due to be upgraded some time in the coming
> months, and it's possible we will see some change after that.

Thanks for the explanations and the links.

I think I've found an answer to both my questions. (Thanks again for
more info in other venues.)

1. Yes, another server will be useful by offloading the hardware running
snowflake-01. Either Snowflake server selection works great or at least
good enough. Or we split the service running on snowflake-01 in two
halves and move one of them to new hardware. The snowflake-server
process itself consumes approximately half of the available CPU, making
the interface between snowflake-server and haproxy a good place to make
the incision.

2. Some traffic might move to snowflake-02 but we don't know for sure.

That is enough for motivating the purchase of a second server.