[tor-bugs] #5807 [Tor Bridge]: Propose better bridge usage statistics

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#5807: Propose better bridge usage statistics
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 Reporter:  karsten      |          Owner:  karsten                
     Type:  enhancement  |         Status:  accepted               
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:  Sponsor F: July 1, 2012
Component:  Tor Bridge   |        Version:                         
 Keywords:               |         Parent:  #3261                  
   Points:  14           |   Actualpoints:                         
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Comment(by karsten):

 Yesterday I realized that we might consider #5824 as a feature.  If
 bridges report relay-only statistics, that includes directory request
 statistics, too.  That's exactly what we're looking for here except that
 we already have the data and don't have to start collecting it.

 I tweaked the bridge descriptor sanitizer to leave `"dirreq-*"` lines in
 and let it process the April 2012 tarball once again.  The result is that
 44% of bridge descriptors already contain directory request statistics.
 For comparison, our current bridge usage statistics are based on data
 contained in 57% of bridge descriptors.

 Here's the first catch: the dirreq stats in bridge descriptors are not
 broken down by country.  To be precise, the `"dirreq-v3-reqs"` lines are
 all empty, because that's how we tried to not record directory request
 statistics on bridges.  But there are lines like `"ok=40,not-enough-
 sigs=0,unavailable=0,not-found=0,not-modified=0,busy=0"` that tell us that
 we sent responses to 40 directory requests.  We can try to fix the missing
 by-country statistics by calculating totals from directory requests and
 breaking down by country based on unique IP numbers.  I'm optimistic that
 the result wouldn't be too much off.  They should be much more reliable
 than statistics based on unique IP numbers only.

 The second catch is that we need to discuss whether we can use the data
 that we scrubbed from bridge descriptors so far.  I'm going to work on a
 quick analysis of the April 2012 data today to evaluate whether they're
 useful or not.  If they are, we should do the tor-dev dance like we do for
 #5684 and discuss stopping to sanitize dirreq stats in bridge descriptors.

 If we actually can use dirreq stats from bridges, that's going to save us
 at least 1 year of waiting until a large enough number of 0.2.4.x bridges
 report the statistics proposed earlier in this ticket.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5807#comment:4>
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