[tor-relays] BWauth no-consensus state in effect

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2015 at 08:53:33PM +0200, nusenu wrote:
> Has this fallback happened before (=some experience on the potential
> impact available) or is this outage happening for the first time since
> the bwauths are in place?

Indeed, it happened a few times back in 2010-2011 when we were
first rolling out the bwauths:
https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.html?graph=torperf&start=2009-05-06&end=2015-08-04&source=all&filesize=50kb
but it's been mighty stable since then.

Interestingly, you'd expect a big bump in torperf response times
when we switched to self-advertised weights. But there isn't one:
https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.html?graph=torperf&start=2015-07-06&end=2015-08-04&source=all&filesize=50kb

I'm guessing this is because we have enough relays, with enough capacity,
to handle the current load adequately.

But that doesn't mean the current relays are useless. Historically
speaking, it means pretty soon more users will show up, once word gets
out that Tor isn't as slow as it used to be. :)

--Roger