[tor-relays] Tor bandwidth scanner "longclaw" slow to the US West Coast

[Neel Chauhan]

Hi juga,

Sorry for the delayed response.

On 2020-08-18 10:05, juga wrote:

> thanks for reporting this issue. Replying inline:

No problem.

> Tor bandwidth scanners and directory authorities not necessarily run in
> the same machine/IP and it's the case of longclaw's bandwidth scanner,
> which is located in the US East Coast.

Good to know.

> If the reason for lower bandwidth measurements is the location -it 
> could
> be other reasons- then it's weird that it would affect the US West 
> Coast
> and not Europe, given it's located in the US East Coast.

Thanks for telling me. It seems weird, West Coast congestion maybe?

> To understand why this is happening, it's very helpful that you give us
> this information.
> I personally suspect it might not be related to the scanner location.
> We'll investigate this as part of the issue you opened at
> https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/sbws/-/issues/40014.
> 
> It might take some weeks, since a lot of the work done on this topic is
> volunteer work. Apologies in advance about it.

Understood.

I don't mind helping if you need help. I am a Core Tor contributor, but 
am also open to working with sbws.

>> Is anyone else hosting West Coast relays having this issue?
> 
> Good question.
> 
> Is
>> "longclaw" actually measuring bandwidth from Europe? If so, WHY?
> 
> No, it's not measuring bandwidth from Europe.

Good to hear.

>> 
>> I got in contact with "longclaw"'s admin and he wasn't too helpful.
> 
> It looks to me that the longclaw's admin has been helpful if they have
> suggested you to write to this mailing list, so that more people can
> check this issue and/or they have suggested you to report an issue in
> gitlab so that the bandwidth scanner developers won't forget about it 
> :)
> 
> Also, not all directory authorities run bandwidth scanners and not all
> of them know about the complexity on how bandwidth is determined.
> 
> Hope it helps.

I guess it's really easy to complain and blame longclaw's admin.

It could also be peering, but I am not sure. Wave does have congestion 
issues from time to time, but this affects more than Tor.

Sometimes, faravahar also may have this issue, but not to the same 
extent, and I can't confirm if this is true.

Thank you for responding.

> Best,
> juga

-Neel