[anti-censorship-team] Not enough unrestricted Snowflake proxy polls

[Cecylia Bocovich]

On 2022-09-28 16:14, David Fifield wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 10:56:57AM -0400, Cecylia wrote:
>> On 2022-09-27 10:56, Cecylia Bocovich wrote:
>>> On 2022-09-27 09:49, David Fifield wrote:
>>>> Besides recruiting more proxies, could we stretch the existing
>>>> unrestricted proxies further? When a proxy finds its own NAT type to be
>>>> unrestricted, it could increase its polling frequency and/or concurrent
>>>> capacity.
>>> That's a good idea.
>>>
>>> I've started working on tackling the problem from the other side[0]: we
>>> have a lot of clients who may not need unrestricted proxies pulling from
>>> that pool because their NAT type is unknown (see attached image).
>>>
>>> If we have these clients optimistically pull from the other pool, we
>>> could reduce the load substantially. However, this change will take a
>>> while to roll out because it has to be included in a Tor Browser
>>> release.
>>>
>>> Updating proxies to poll more frequently is easier to roll out quickly.
>>>
>>> [0] https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/40178
>> Oops, attaching image.
> Could probetest being sick also contribute to a lack of the right NAT
> types? It's at 100% CPU again, just now as I check it.
>
> /etc/runit/snowflake-probetest/run currently has "timeout 7d"; what if
> we restarted it every hour?

Good idea. I just set it arbitrarily to 4 hours. Right now proxies 
re-attempt to discover their NAT type every 24 hours, we could shorten 
this interval for proxies with unknown NAT types.