[tor-relays] Why would consensus weight would be declining like this?

[Roger Dingledine]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2014 at 05:02:07PM -0400, Tora Tora Tora wrote:
> Declining dramatically
> 
> https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/90743CFA1B93295B9334CC0C625D22990AABA25F
> 
> vs
> 
> https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/CC2F7C6ED12B67CB3882B98213E02DEF2CB82293
> 
> that is holding steady

A fine research question. A lot of the questions from
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay
apply here too.

One theory is that it's a result of variance -- they're both relatively
small relays, so one stream that uses lots of bandwidth and randomly
happens to pick this relay could be enough to skew a few bandwidth tests,
pushing you down for a while.

In theory it should recover, since both relays are publishing similar
underlying self-measured bandwidths:
https://exonerator.torproject.org/serverdesc?desc-id=825feea5d643a228e121d0fbfdecf47acff4870f
https://exonerator.torproject.org/serverdesc?desc-id=ec726fe88dbc60d18b3402fff2bace3564292546

But it might take quite some time to adjust, since the bandwidth
authorities don't measure very often.

--Roger