[tor-dev] Scaling tor for a global population

[Sebastian Hahn]

On 27 Sep 2014, at 02:18, Mike Perry <mikeperry at torproject.org> wrote:
> If we were willing to tolerate 10% directory overhead this would allow
> for 5 times as many users. In other words, 100M daily connecting users.
> 
> We would still need to find some way to fund the growth of the network
> to support this 40X increase, but there are no actual *technical*
> reasons why it cannot be done.

One thing there isn't an automatic answer to is whether our current users
and our would-be users are differ in their usage pattern. Currently, my
intuition would be that most of our users are responsible for a relative
small amount of traffic, whereas we have some users who pull a lot of
data. I wonder what happens with Netflix, youtube and other services.
We might at least want to try and figure this into the equation by
estimating our average daily bytes sent/received per users, and
comparing that to the bytes sent/received by our target group.

Cheers
Sebastian