[tor-relays] Permissible traffic volume log density (was: Announcing the Walla Walla Project)

[admin]

Andreas,

also to you, sorry for responding late. Please see my comments inline.

---- On Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:16:06 +0200 Andreas Krey<a.krey at gmx.de> wrote ----  
 > As far as I understood Jacob asked you how many traffic data point you 
 > log, and I asked him how many are acceptable. (And pointed out that the 
 > given screen, although showing only apparently monthly numbers, could 
 > be used to get more detailed information by polling it, depending on 
 > the update rate.) 
 >  
I understand. I'm certainly looking forward to a continued discussion here. That said, we currently update, as I outlined earlier, all hourly, daily and monthly vnstat graphs at an hourly interval. I provided our tiny script + cronjob in my previous answer to Moritz.
 
 > I do similar, but I run a simple cronjob around ifconfig. :-) Also for 
 > seeing the total traffic consumption on my relays (and my home DSL). 
 > I then feed that into gnuplot for some graphs for me to see; and 
 > the interplay of RelayBandwithRate and RelayBandwidthBurst ist 
 > pretty plain to see in there. 
 > 
Nice approach. Would you mind sharing your fingerprint/nickname? I'd love to look at it with Atlas.

 > There are pretty obvious patterns esp. on low-bandwith relays; 
 > if you collected them all you'd possibly be able to reconstruct 
 > circuit usage. Hence my question how coarse traffic volume logging 
 > should be. 
 > 
Ok, to be brutally honest, I'm obviously too naive at the moment to understand the actual issue thoroughly. Are you referring to some opportunity to draw conclusions about specific Tor users and effectively track/"uncover" them? I thought about that one for some time now but I, in all honesty, don't get it in detail. We have very many circuits open in parallel, even on the lower bw relays (I just looked at /var/log/tor/log at one of these lower bw relays), so I'd assume the diversity in connections is way too high to draw conclusions about single circuits by just looking at, even hourly updated, total traffic stats. Isn't it?

We use the stats for a better understanding of total traffic, especially over time (e.g. I already noticed that there are some adjustments to the config needed for daily accounting/bandwidthrate/-burst for our higher bw relays utilizing these very traffic stats - as it seems, while the higher bw relays are blowing traffic out the door like crazy ;-), especially asurahosting1, the lower bw relays, e.g. tailoredvps1, do not even utilize the accounting to its full potential without a slightly higher bw_adv)

For these kind of insights the stats are actually very much worth it currently.

Looking forward to a continued discussion,
Thomas
 
 > Andreas 
 >  
 > --  
 > "Totally trivial. Famous last words." 
 > From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@*.org> 
 > Date: Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:21 -0800 
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