[tor-onions] HSv3 load balancing: not yet?

[George Kadianakis]

rossulbricht at cock.li writes:

> I read the tor hsv3 specs and saw some parts considering load balancing.
>
> ===
> 1.5. In more detail: Scaling to multiple hosts
>
>     This design is compatible with our current approaches for scaling 
> hidden
>     services. Specifically, hidden service operators can use onionbalance 
> to
>     achieve high availability between multiple nodes on the HSDir
>     layer. Furthermore, operators can use proposal 255 to load balance 
> their
>     hidden services on the introduction layer. See [SCALING-REFS] for 
> further
>     discussions on this topic and alternative designs.
> ===
>     The reason for a maximum value of 20 is to give enough scalability to 
> tools
>     like OnionBalance to be able to load balance up to 120 servers (20 x 
> 6
>     HSDirs) but also in order for the descriptor size to not overwhelmed 
> hidden
>     service directories with user defined values that could be gigantic.
> ===
>
> So... can we benefit from this? Onionbalance seems to have been 
> abandoned
> and prop255 seems to have stalled. Is there any effective way to 
> properly
> load balance hsv3?
>

Hello,

we are currently developing onionbalance for v3 onions. Please see
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26768 for more details.

It should be out at some point around Christmas: consider it as our
Christmas gift from us to you!

Until then you can still do naive onion load balancing by just
configuring a bunch of onion services with the same private key, so that
they race each other. That would still work with v3s.