On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 01:26:26PM +0000, mick wrote:
Whilst not quite a 1:1 ratio, it is close enough I think to show that this is simply an agnostic relay. However, would not an exit node show unbalanced traffic? Most net activity these days is web browsing which is decidedly asymmetric - small outbound requests result in much larger inbound responses. Won't an exit relay reflect that as it is the last hop before the actual target site?
It'd be balanced by the encrypted traffic to the middle node. There would actually be a bit more volume there because of the cell padding and SSL protocol overhead, but as long as that's a constant proportion for both directions it'd stay balanced. That may not be quite exactly true, since the upstream side of normal web browsing is probably more likely than the downstream side to generate short cells that have to be padded, but I'd be surprised if that was that significant a difference.