Importance of HTTP connection keep-alive

Fabian Keil freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de
Wed Apr 18 18:17:02 UTC 2007


Juliusz Chroboczek <Juliusz.Chroboczek at pps.jussieu.fr> wrote:

> > With http://www.kde.org/screenshots/:
> 
> So according to this test, this page downloads roughly two times
> faster through Polipo/tor than through Privoxy/tor, right?

It certainly did for the five samples I took.
 
> > I also tested with another website (http://www.spiegel.de/):
> 
> This test is not representative: this is an HTTP/1.0 site.  There are
> fortunately very few of these left nowadays.

What exactly is the problem with the site?
Watching the circuits in Vidalia I had the impression
that Polipo used keep-alive.

> > Privoxy may have had a slight advantage here, because by removing
> > three tracking pixels it had to do three requests less.
> 
> And notwithstanding the fact that you so carefully crafted this test
> to advantage Privoxy, Polipo/tor was still 13% faster?

To which numbers are you referring here? Repeating my results:

Firefox + Privoxy + Tor:
110.619s, 78.505s, 20.397s, 36.926s, 73,442s
63.983s
62,956s
43,588s

Firefox + Polipo + Tor:
93.979s, 33.102s, 34.242s, 123.365s, 99.740s
76.886s
75.987s
53,774s

So Polipo+Tor were slightly slower, while the reason seems
to be bad luck with the speed of the Tor circuits.

However if I understand you correctly, you're saying
that I intentionally chose a site where Polipo has
problems?

Can you name some other sites that you consider valid targets then?
I can test again with Privoxy's actions disabled.

Fabian
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/attachments/20070418/3e3bf8ab/attachment.pgp>


More information about the tor-talk mailing list