On 9/6/13 3:58 PM, Karsten Loesing wrote:
I just finished a first draft of a tech report sketching out the requirements and a software design for a new Torperf implementation.
Sathya, Kevin, and I improved this tech report draft a lot and finally published it today:
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/torperf2-2013-10-30.pdf
From the introduction:
""" Four years ago, we presented a simple tool to measure performance of the Tor network. This tool, called Torperf, requests static files of three different sizes over the Tor network and logs timestamps of various request substeps. These data turned out to be quite useful to observe user-perceived network performance over time. However, static file downloads are not the typical use case of a user browsing the web using Tor, so absolute numbers are not very meaningful. Also, Torperf consists of a bunch of shell scripts which makes it neither very user-friendly to set up and run, nor extensible to cover new use cases.
For reference, we made an earlier approach 1.5 years later that suggested redesigning the Python parts in Torperf, but that redesign never happened.
In this report we outline requirements and a software design for a rewrite of Torperf. We loosely start with non-functional requirements, so aspects like user-friendliness or extensibility, because these requirements drive the rewrite more than the immediate need for new features. After that, we discuss actual functional requirements, so experiments that we want to perform to measure things in the Tor network on a regular and automated basis. Finally we suggest a software design that fulfills all these requirements. """
The fact that we now have a published design document doesn't mean that all design work is done. But having a tech report makes it easier to reference our design ideas in future discussions. New ideas should probably go into a second tech report draft or design document of some kind. The goal here is not to produce paper but to be explicit about design decisions.
Thanks, Sathya, Kevin, and the other people for providing valuable feedback on the Torperf rewrite!
All the best, Karsten