Not enough exit nodes? (was Re: more letters from the feds)

[Jay Goodman Tamboli]

On Jan 27, 2007, at 11:12:01, patgus at stonewwwall.org wrote:

>  Problem still exists though, that Tor needs more exit nodes. If  
> nobody is
> willing to run an exit server the performance of the network suffers
> dramatically. I personally find the performance of the network to be
> almost unusable, so I choose other pay-for anonymity services. This is
> not a bash of Tor or its design, but as we all know there are  
> simply not
> enough servers running to handle the amount of clients.

Pardon me if this has been answered, but has it been shown for sure  
that the major cause of Tor's slowness is lack of exit nodes?  
Anecdotally, I seem to find Tor's bandwidth to be adequate, but  
latency is a greater problem. I seem to remember someone recently  
saying that a lot of the slowdown is from slow encryption/decryption  
processing on server nodes, be they exit or middlemen.

If the problem is not bandwidth, would more servers help, or do we  
need faster servers (as in CPU speed)? Perhaps the latency is simply  
something that cannot be avoided, since it seems to me connections  
over Tor are going to have at least triple the latency of a direct  
connection.

In any case, I don't think more servers hurts the network (though  
query if it brings down the average speed of the network), so the  
generic response letter suggested by patgus would probably be a good  
idea.

/jgt
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