[tor-bugs] #17907 [Tor]: Modify clients to consistently send N% of initial consensus requests to the authorities

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#17907: Modify clients to consistently send N% of initial consensus requests to the
authorities
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     Reporter:  teor         |      Owner:
         Type:  enhancement  |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium       |  Milestone:  Tor: 0.2.8.x-final
    Component:  Tor          |    Version:
     Severity:  Normal       |   Keywords:  ipv6
Actual Points:               |  Parent ID:
       Points:               |    Sponsor:
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 We currently use the directory authority statistics to estimate the number
 of clients in the Tor network.

 But fallback directories will handle initial consensus downloads in future
 releases.

 So, to preserve client statistics, we can modify Tor clients to make a
 certain small percentage (1%?) of initial consensus downloads to the
 directory authorities. If we scale the authority downloads from each Tor
 release by this factor, we can estimate the number of clients.

 This is particularly important for client IPv6 bootstrap (#17840), as only
 some authorities and fallbacks have IPv6 (and the proportion of fallbacks
 is lower than the proportion of authorities).

 We could change the meaning of DirAuthorityFallbackRate to "the
 authorities see this proportion of queries", or implement another option,
 and document the interaction with DirAuthorityFallbackRate.

 (I think the second option is better, but we'd end up essentially
 obsoleting DirAuthorityFallbackRate.)

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/17907>
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