[anti-censorship-team] Improving Snowflake performance by adjusting smux parameters

[Kali Kaneko]

On Wed, Jul 14, 2021 at 03:20:31PM -0400, Cecylia Bocovich wrote:

> I starting doing a few quick performance tests by just modifying the
> client. This should be enough to check the impact of tuning the
> MaxStreamBuffer and MaxReceiveBuffer for download speeds.

Last weekend Jacobo and me were playing a little bit with tweaking the
buffer sizes on the client. I kind of observe some patterns, but after a
few runs I suspected that I was catching more temporal network
variations than any buffer effects.

https://0xacab.org/kali/snowflake-metrics/-/blob/no-masters/data/Rplots.pdf
https://0xacab.org/kali/snowflake-metrics/-/blob/no-masters/data/maxstreambuffer.png

I wanted to measure too the number of snowflakes needed to complete a
single download, to try to isolate the high variability across different
runs. I might be wrong, but in a quick exploration the time-to-bootstrap
seemed to be significant as a predictor of the download rate together
with the buffer size.

Before continuing with these tests: is it advisable to run this kind of
tests against the working infrastructure, or should I better setup
snowbox in order to parametrize any changes? (ideally, simulating
real-world latencies).

-- 
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We believe in rough consensus and working code.