[tor-relays] Guard flag flapping

[torrry at Safe-mail.net]

> Thanks for running the tests. Which exit nodes led to poor performance? I would like to try to reproduce any performance problems.

I did not record the nodes (they were in Europe). A simple test you could run on your server is fetching directory info from nodes that have directory functionality enabled.

wget http://<relay IP>:<dir port>/tor/server/all

e.g.: wget http://176.126.252.11:443/tor/server/all

You can get a bandwidth-sorted list of nodes at:
https://torstatus.blutmagie.de/

There is a column that has the directory port.

> How would you measure performance between my node and a given exit without being influenced by the properties of the middle relay? You can only set me as an entrynode, and you can't pick a specific middle, 

You are wrong. :-) 

You can build arbitrary circuits by hand. There are libraries like Stem, Txtorcon, TorCtl and there is a text based, SMTP-like protocol that you can use directly:

https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/control-spec.txt

> so how would you know that the low performance was my node and not the random middle relay?

Your node would be a non-random middle relay.

> >  The bandwidth auths probably downrate the measurement results of your server severely because of those slow connections.
>  
> Probably? How can we investigate further?

AFAIK, the raw bandwidth auth measurements are not published, only the total result.