To try to get to the bottom of the recent influx of clients to the Tor network, it might be useful to compare load characteristics since 8/19 for nodes with different types of flags.
People with Munin setups: it would be especially useful if you could post links/graph images for connection counts, bandwidth, and CPU load since 8/19.
I'm particularly interested if people with just the Exit flag (w/o Guard) are seeing increased connection counts that aren't explained by uptime or ramp-up. So far the only datapoint I have for this is https://www.torservers.net/munin/torservers.net/psilotorlu.torservers.net/in... but it looks like that node just rebooted and possibly rekeyed, so it's connection increase could just be due to that.
It would also be interesting to see if Guard+Exits are seeing a greater increase in connection counts than just Guards.
I'm also wondering if any aspects of the load has any other relation to node flags.