[tor-dev] Summary of meek's costs, February 2015

David Fifield david at bamsoftware.com
Fri Mar 13 02:39:20 UTC 2015


Here's the summary of meek's CDN fees for February 2015. Earlier reports:
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-August/007429.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-October/007576.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-November/007716.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-December/007916.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-January/008082.html
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2015-February/008235.html

            App Engine +   Amazon + Azure = total by month
February 2014    $0.09 +       -- +    -- =    $0.09
March 2014       $0.00 +       -- +    -- =    $0.00
April 2014       $0.73 +       -- +    -- =    $0.73
May 2014         $0.69 +       -- +    -- =    $0.69
June 2014        $0.65 +       -- +    -- =    $0.65
July 2014        $0.56 +    $0.00 +    -- =    $0.56
August 2014      $1.56 +    $3.10 +    -- =    $4.66
September 2014   $4.02 +    $4.59 + $0.00 =    $8.61
October 2014    $40.85 +  $130.29 + $0.00 =  $171.14
November 2014  $224.67 +  $362.60 + $0.00 =  $587.27
December 2014  $326.81 +  $417.31 + $0.00 =  $744.12
January 2015   $464.37 +  $669.02 + $0.00 = $1133.39
February 2015  $650.53 +  $604.83 + $0.00 = $1255.36
--
total by CDN  $1715.53 + $2191.74 + $0.00 = $3907.27 grand total

My motivation behind making these reports is to provide transparency and
to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge. I think it's useful
to document these kinds of numbers, for the benefit of others who want
to experiment with this kind of system.

The number of simultaneous users was up a little bit in February
relative to December, hovering around 1250.

https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-transport.html?graph=userstats-bridge-transport&start=2014-12-01&end=2015-02-28&transport=meek

The bill for Amazon actually went down last month, for the first time
ever. Okay, that is partially because February is about 10% shorter than
January. Actually, if you account for the shorter month, the bill is
eerily almost exactly the same:
	$669.02 * 28/31 = $604.28 ≈ $604.83 (actual Feb. cost)


== App Engine a.k.a. meek-google ==

Bandwidth was up about 30% and instance hours were up about 45%.

At the end of February, I tried tweaking some performance parameters as
an experiment to cause fewer instances to be created. This is to reduce
costs, and also because I guess that extra instances don't really help
much with performance in this case. The creation of instances is
triggered by the application's response latency, which for us is usually
caused by some temporary network issue, rather than a lack of CPU or
something like that. We'll see next month whether it has an effect.

Here is how the Google costs broke down:
	4114 GB             $492.71
	3226 instance hours $157.82
Compared to the previous month:
	2944 GB             $353.31
	2221 instance hours $111.06

https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/88F745840F47CE0C6A4FE61D827950B06F9E4534


== Amazon a.k.a. meek-amazon ==

meek-amazon was pretty much the same as last month.

I am thinking about disabling the public Amazon backend, just because
it's a bit more expensive and I haven't been able to get free credits
for it. And when I say "disabling," I mean just removing it as a default
option in Tor Browser; it wouldn't just stop working immediately. My
idea is that we could publish a guide on setting up your own Amazon
CloudFront instance, if CloudFront is a backend that works for you.

Asia Pacific (Singapore)	115M requests	$138.07	1018 GB	$147.04
Asia Pacific (Sydney)		 76K requests	  $0.10	   1 GB	  $0.06
Asia Pacific (Tokyo)		 29M requests	 $34.26	 193 GB	 $24.99
EU (Ireland)			111M requests	$133.22	 868 GB	 $68.23
South America (Sao Paulo)	  2M requests	  $4.25	  11 GB	  $2.61
US East (Northern Virginia)	 30M requests	 $29.90	 278 GB	 $22.12
--
total				363M requests	$339.80	2369 GB	$265.05

https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/3FD131B74D9A96190B1EE5D31E91757FADA1A4F3


== Azure a.k.a. meek-azure ==

I haven't been able to get estimated costs out of Azure. I didn't get a
reply to my request last month to be added to whatever plan lets you see
usage data.

I did, however, recover the bandwidth history for the meek-azure bridge
from Onionoo, so we can estimate what the cost would be. If we estimate
a traffic mix similar to that of meek-amazon, with 40% coming from North
America and Europe, and 60% coming from elsewhere, then the costs would
be:

https://onionoo.torproject.org/bandwidth?fingerprint=AA033EEB61601B2B7312D89B62AAA23DC3ED8A34
2014-09   47 GB   $5.53
2014-10  298 GB  $35.04
2014-11  500 GB  $58.80
2014-12  512 GB  $60.21
2015-01  638 GB  $75.03
2015-02  614 GB  $72.21

https://globe.torproject.org/#/bridge/AA033EEB61601B2B7312D89B62AAA23DC3ED8A34


David Fifield
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