[metrics-team] Request for new metric: usage by time of day

[teor]

Hi,

> On 3 Dec 2017, at 22:22, alexander taylor <ajxtaylor at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I'd like to put in a vote for a graph that shows the total amount of traffic going through the tor network by time of day and day of the week.

I'm sorry, as of our latest alpha release, this is no longer possible.
It was already difficult when relays reported statistics every 4 hours.
But now we have made relays report bandwidth statistics every 24 hours.

We made this change because we believe it makes it harder for adversaries
to find onion services and relays by sending traffic to them or their guard.

For more detail, see:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-October/012517.html
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/23856

> That would help me decide how important it is that I leave my tor relay running during the hours I need that bandwidth for myself the most. For example, if I see everyone using tor at 8PM in my timezone, I'll be more willing to keep my tor relay running even if that's when I'm trying to watch a movie.

Please choose the times that suit you: the network is large enough to adapt.

Also, don't be surprised if your relay's bandwidth varies, relays are measured
at random times, so if it is measured during a slow period, it will get less
bandwidth for the next day or two. 

> It would also help me understand if my tor connection is slow because of global bandwidth reasons, or rather it's just me who's got a bad connection or bad circuit. I could answer the question "tor is slow for me right now; is tor supposed to be slow at 3am on a thursday?" and then plan my tor usage according to the least active times of days.

I'm sorry, we can't support this right now.

But we are working on network-wide statistics that are safer to collect:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-December/012644.html

We hadn't really considered measuring them over shorter periods than
a day, but it would be possible. We would have to make the collection
long enough so that the added noise isn't too high, and any deliberate
added bandwidth isn't too obvious.

That's something for the network and metrics teams to work on.

T
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