Check out these pictures of relays in the consensus during November and December. (Warning, the linked images are huge, just look at the downscaled attachments if you want.)
November https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/graphs/microdescs/microdescs-2014-11.png (720×13242 pixels)
December (spot the anomaly) https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/graphs/microdescs/microdescs-2014-12.png (744×18136 pixels)
Each row is one descriptor, and each column is one hour. The rows are sorted so that descriptors with similar uptimes are nearby. The conspicuous narrow vertical stripe in the lower right of the December graph is a few thousand descriptors entering the consensus all at once and then leaving it again.
If you want to dig into any patterns you see, the lines of these text files correspond 1:1 to the rows of the images. https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/graphs/microdescs/microdescs-2014-11.txt https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/graphs/microdescs/microdescs-2014-12.txt
Source code is in https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/graphs/microdescs/. wget https://collector.torproject.org/archive/relay-descriptors/microdescs/microd... tar xJf microdescs-2014-11.tar.xz tar xJf microdescs-2014-12.tar.xz ./microdescs --output microdescs-2014-11 microdescs-2014-11 ./microdescs --output microdescs-2014-12 microdescs-2014-12
David Fifield
