On Tue, Mar 01, 2022 at 04:26:48PM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
It has been great to see all the support and encouragement for people running Snowflake proxies. Thank you!
But there is a problem: the Snowflake bridge (which all the temporary proxies forward their traffic to) is going as fast as can on its current hardware. The server is running close to 100% on all CPUs more or less constantly. As more people use Snowflake, they each get a smaller share of the limited available performance. The limited capacity of the bridge is the cause of the [recent slowness of Snowflake](https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/t49i14)%E2%80%94in the past 2 weeks it's gone [from 12,000 to 16,000 users, without a proportional increase in bandwidth](https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB69...
We've spent significant engineering resources already to make the most of the hardware, such as [load balancing multiple tor instances](https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/103) since a few weeks ago. This effort has roughly doubled the available bandwidth of the bridge, but it's still not enough. Demand will only continue to rise.
Do all snowflake users have to get pointed at the same machine/IP address? That is, would a bunch of people running bridges each contributing a fraction of 100 TB/month (~= 300 Mbps) be helpful?