Hi, I forgot to mention a couple of other things. There might be legitimate reasons for those negative spikes. One that I am thinking of is that when there is an operating system update, relays are rebooted and this also causes them to lose their flags: https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html So if you see a negative spike and you know there was an update to one of the libraries used by little-t-tor, it might be what caused it. In February, this might have also affected our relays count too: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/02/kimwolf-botnet-swamps-anonymity-network-... So yes, there are a few reasons, and at this moment we cannot always exclude issues with our metrics infrastructure either. I hope this gives you more context, and sorry for the rushed reply from earlier today. Cheers, -hiro On 15/4/26 12:36, Silvia Puglisi [Hiro] wrote:
Hi,
metrics.torproject.org has been suffering load issues for a while now and sometimes produces erroneous graphs. We are in the process of replacing it, but it is going to take us some more time.
The main reason we sometimes see spikes that do not reflect actual data is simply memory errors from the Java process that does daily aggregation of network data. The kernel kills it and data is left in an inconsistent state. We do not have public logs, but you would be able to verify the number of relays running on the network by parsing consensus documents that are publicly available at collector.torproject.org. The details on how to compute those statistics are also publicly available on our metrics website [1].
I hope this answers your question.
Cheers, -hiro
[1] https://metrics.torproject.org/reproducible-metrics.html#servers
On 14/4/26 14:57, ttlns via network-health wrote:
Around 2 weeks ago, I posted the following concerns regarding "negative spikes" for the number of relays measured by metrics.torproject.org [1] in forum.torproject.org [2] (and earlier on r/TOR [3] ) :
Are there any good explanations on why these spikes occurred? Might those outages imply some centralized infrastructure? If so, how is that not a major concern? So far, I have not received any definite explanations.
If those spikes happen to be measurement errors, I imagine that there should be logs somewhere to support this explanation. 3. Does such evidence exist publicly? 4. If not (3), where would that evidence be stored?
Sources: [1] http://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html?start=2022-01-01&end=2026-03-... [2] https://forum.torproject.org/t/explanation-on-negative-spikes-in-number-of-r... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/1s8wx24/explanation_on_spikes_in_numbe...
I appreciate any clues, hints, or pointers on where to ask further.
Best, ttlns _______________________________________________ network-health mailing list -- network-health@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to network-health-leave@lists.torproject.org