We tried to unstick some of the lowest bandwidth relays (below 1000),
You mean 0..1 weight (1 KiB/s and lower)? They may be really bad.
I guess, that good test range is 10..20 (or 5..30).
and our initial results are:
- most (15) of relays we tried are actually very slow, or down,
- some (3) relays that we tried went down before we could see if we had changed anything,
Relays can be additionally filtered by Stable flag (or uptime). If relay haven't rebooted for weeks, there is a big chance that it will stay online during the tests too.
We are trying on a larger set now.
I hope this will give more successful attempts.
But these results indicate that most relays that are measured slow are actually slow for tor clients. (Which is what matters.)
If larger set will not give better results, I will try to make my own test program and launch it from my location. Maybe different approach will give different results. I am still sure, that low weight estimate is hiding many fast relays.
-- Vort