[network-health] Re: Explanation on (negative) spikes in number of relays

Hey Hiro,

Thank you for the elaborate answer!

First of all, I would like to apologize for the initial duplicate messages which got caught by review. Unfortunately, mailman3 [1] did not show any confirmation, that a thread has or will be created and redirected (302 Found) me directly to [2]. If duplicate messages from new users are a frequent event, I suppose that adding some confirmation might help.

> 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
I will give that a try and post an update to this thread. Thank you for the suggestion!

> There might be legitimate 
reasons for those negative spikes.
I would suppose that there should not be any reasons for many relays to go offline at the same time.
1.  Am I correctly assuming, that a significant drop in number of relays would create a vulnerable state for the overall network?

> 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

2. Am I correctly assuming, that the relay operators are responsible for updates of their own system?
3. If (2), how can or is the integrity of those updates ensured? Whilst the underlying software is OSS, I would doubt that many relay operators review the code thoroughly. e.g. I imagine ideally, there could/should be some voting system (possibly over the directory servers?)  for verifying the integrity of an update?

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3
[2] https://lists.torproject.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/network-health@lists.torproject.org/2026/4/?

Best,
ttlns