[tor-onions] Garbage collection of abandoned onion servers

[Alec Muffett]

On Sat, 18 Feb 2023 at 06:53, p13dz p13dz via tor-onions <
tor-onions at lists.torproject.org> wrote:

> At the level of the Onion protocol, it would be great to increase the
> number of intro points per descriptor to a higher number (say 10x from what
> we have today).
>

Speaking as someone who experimented with that, doing so actually did not
have the benefits which we thought it would.  Introduction points are not
actually used very much - essentially once per fresh connection attempt,
and then cached locally - and having (e.g.) 10 introduction points to
register didn't assist performance, in fact it made recovery times (after
an outage) somewhat worse because there were more IPs to register.

This latter is also part of why I stopped recommending using OnionBalance
to big sites like Reddit, Twitter & the BBC; simpler instead to run 2 or 3
instances which farm out access to a proper web-tier, since those 2 or 3
instances do not actually have to do much work; this (plus the practice of
descriptor caching) also implements an ersatz
"round-robin"-style loadbalancing amongst the HSDir, if you tune the tor
instances to republish their descriptors at different times.

- alec

-- 
https://alecmuffett.com/about
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