Broadband Reports: Tor Network Bogged Down by P2P

[Roger Dingledine]

On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 11:15:49PM -0400, Dustin Eward wrote:
> It's time for Tor to expand, not regulate.  And if expansions isn't 
> possible, just let it suck!  I can't imagine many fileshare people will 
> cleave unto dial-up speeds with their broadband...  Once they learn that 
> it sucks to use Tor, they'll stop.  We need knee-jerk decisions in this 
> project like we need knee-jerk political actions...

I like this approach -- let Tor self-regulate itself because when it
gets too overloaded, people will leave until it works again.

There's a potential problem with it, though, when different users place
different value on their time and on their security.

So one failure mode would be if the filesharers care more about being
anonymous than the web users. Then they'd just leave it running in the
background, and not mind that it takes 6 days to download a file rather
than 6 hours, because eventually it arrives.

The current Tor network clearly can't sustain very many of these people,
but if all the web users give up first, then "let it suck" means most
of our users go away.

It remains to be seen whether this will happen, of course, but we're
trying to come up with some useful technical approaches too. :)

--Roger