David Fifield david@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.