Hello all,
One of our goals with our current performance work is to reduce the overload of relays in the network. The implementation of proposal 328[1] a while back made different overload indicators available to relay operators and since a couple of weeks ago those can be tracked via Onionoo[2] as well.
As we know that a lot of our relay operators use relay search to check for the health of their relays, we have launched a new feature there, too, to help them know when their relays are overloaded.
When a relay is in the overloaded state we show an amber dot next to the relay nickname.
Currently we are counting between 50 and 80 overloaded relays and between 10 and 20 overloaded bridges. The overloaded state is reached when one or many of the possible load metrics have been triggered. When this happens we show it for 72 hours after the relay has recovered [3]. Note, though, that not all of the exposed overload metrics are triggering the overload indicator on relay search yet.
If you noticed your relay is overloaded, please check the following support article to find out how you can recover to a "normal" state:
https://support.torproject.org/relay-operators/relay-bridge-overloaded/
Let us known how you find this new feature.
Cheers, -hiro
[1] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/328-relay-overload-... [2] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-project/2021-August/003168.html [3] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/dir-spec.txt#n637