I've been wanting to do this for years. Just a quick announcement that Stem now lazy-loads descriptors, giving it a nice performance boost... Server descriptors: 27% faster Extrainfo descriptors: 71% faster Microdescriptors: 43% faster Consensus: 37% faster For details see... https://gitweb.torproject.org/stem.git/commit/?id=3dac7c5 Note that descriptor validation is now opt-in rather than opt-out, so if you'd prefer validation over performance you'll now need to include 'validate = True'. This is a pretty big overhaul so please let me know if you run into any issues. Cheers! -Damian