Roger Dingledine via tor-dev <tor-dev@lists.torproject.org> writes:
(1) Relays generally don't fetch the extra-info descriptors, so actually separating them saves quite a bit of bandwidth/storage on relays. Not a big deal maybe but worth keeping in mind. It could be helpful to get some actual numbers here.
In the uncompressed form, /tor/server/all is about 50MB and /tor/extra/all about 25MB. Merging these two together would result in /tor/server/all to be about 75MB. Assuming the worst case is true, i.e. every relay updates it's router descriptor in every consensus voting period, only 25 MB of additional data would be downloaded per relay per hour. In my opinion, even the worst case numbers are absolutely acceptable. For a relay, 25MB of more traffic per hour is effectively nothing. -Clara