On 13 Oct 2017, at 13:37, dawuud dawuud@riseup.net wrote:
I hope it rings loud and clear that this is a *huge* problem for the health of the Tor network that many of the top 100 Tor relays with the Fast and Stable flags cannot even build a single Tor circuit to any of the other top 100 relays!
In conclusion, many of these circuit build failures are very likely NOT the fault of the relay operators but instead this points to the failure of the current Tor Bandwidth Authority system. Not only is it old and broken, even if it was to work "properly" it would still be broken by design if:
a. it's not performing circuit build tests
It's unclear what you mean here. The scanner has to build circuits to measure their speed.
b. it's not distributed and thus more easily gameable
Yes. But this is a major change in design and implementation.
Instead, we could increase the circuit build failure penalty in the current bandwidth authority code. It was originally designed for a much smaller network, with different load characteristics.
T