[tor-relays] Consensus Weight calculation

Vort vvort at yandex.ru
Sun Jun 11 05:33:15 UTC 2017


Hello.

Recently I have decided to create a new relay.
After several days of waiting, I have realized that decision of
  Bandwidth Authorities, that my bandwidth is 1000 times lower
  than it should be, is pretty stable.

That is bad on its own, but I was wandering - how many other relays
  suffers from the same problem?
Since all network data is open to analysis, I have decided to
  calculate some statistics.
As "Consensus Weight", theoretically, should correspond to relay's
  bandwidth, first thought was to compare it with "Advertised Bandwidth"
  value (assuming there not too many liars on the network).
The result has revealed some anomalies:
  https://s8.hostingkartinok.com/uploads/images/2017/06/fed1cf8b57fc027223c8eaf3deb0d28a.png
First, and most important, - a lot of relays have bandwidth estimate
  in range 0-50: 1082 of them. Second - there are incorrect estimates
  for popular bandwidths of 5, 10 and 20 MBits.
Next question was: what estimates was actually assigned to that
  bandwidth spikes? Maybe all zeroes? This led me to another charts:
  https://s8.hostingkartinok.com/uploads/images/2017/06/8cefb70fce667a1b89c783ed2bfc9442.png
  https://s8.hostingkartinok.com/uploads/images/2017/06/2e42634ea3f9b71df8a7fd17c27660d9.png
  x here is "Advertised Bandwidth", y is "Consensus Weight".
I was expected to see something close to x = y line. But result was
  much worse. First problem (not too important) is a lot of randomness.
  5 MiB relay can be easily detected as 1 MiB or 10 MiB.
Second one is a thing, which, probably, steals a lot of available network
  bandwidth: relays with low "Advertised Bandwidth" gets much less
  traffic than they can handle. Almost no relay with speed < 500 KiB
  is rated correctly. Similarly, high-speed relays have higher weight
  than needed.
If all 0-50KiB-estimated relays are capable of serving at least
  100 KiB, fixing this problem will lead to ~ (100-25)*1082 = 82 MiB/s
  increase of network bandwidth. But they have even more potential,
  I think.

Do anyone have ideas how to solve this problem?

-- Vort



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