[anti-censorship-team] Spike in client polls from Snowflake broker metrics

[Cecylia Bocovich]

On 2023-08-30 14:28, Cecylia Bocovich wrote:
> I was alerted by trinity-1686a on irc that Snowflake standalone proxy 
> operators were reporting on #tor-relays about increased OOM errors from 
> increased load as of 2023-08-28.
> 
> After looking at the Snowfake broker metrics[0], there's a huge jump in 
> client polls (seen by summing the client-denied-count and 
> client-snowflake-match-count).
> 
> I've attached a graph of the collected prometheus metrics that shows 
> this spike happening at exactly 17:40 UTC on 2023-08-27. It looks like 
> way too sharp an increase to me to be a censorship event, perhaps it is 
> a DoS?
> 
> It's still too early to see the bridge metrics from the metrics page, 
> but we should start to see the effects there tomorrow.
> 
> [0] https://metrics.torproject.org/collector.html#snowflake-stats

I should add that it looks to have stopped around 12:25 UTC earlier 
today (2023-08-30).