[anti-censorship-team] Snowflake bridge operations

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Jan 17, 2024 at 10:46:28AM -0700, David Fifield wrote:
> So with 3 bridges (and assuming the 3 bridge lines are fully distributed
> to all Snowflake clients; i.e. including Tor Browser and Orbot), then we
> would expect each bridge to receive 1/3 or traffic. But that raises the
> question of why does the current snowflake-02 get only about 25% of what
> snowflake-01 gets? I don't know--for a long time I though it was because
> snowflake-02 had not been properly released in Orbot, and so a large
> fraction of clients only knew about the snowflake-01 bridge, but it's
> been a while and that should no longer be the case. It may have
> something to do with a more limited network uplink on snowflake-02. That
> host and uplink, too, are due to be upgraded some time in the coming
> months, and it's possible we will see some change after that.

Does the client tell the broker which bridge they are planning to
reach? If yes, we could use that to narrow down where the surprise
might be (distinguishing "how come way less than half the requests are
for snowflake-02" from "ok we are sending the same number of clients
to each so how come snowflake-02 has way less load"). If no, maybe we
should instrument things so we can know.

--Roger