No, estimating the number of users doesn’t work by counting connections, it works by counting directory requests, which Tor clients do every few hours. The number of distinct connections does not affect how often a Tor client does a directory request, so the estimated number of users doesn’t change. See:
- Sources – Tor Metrics
- https://research.torproject.org/techreports/counting-daily-bridge-users-2012-10-24.pdf
In the snowflake-01 relay search graphs, you can see that the increase in bandwidth since 2023-03-13 has not been matched by an increase in users, at least not yet. It looks like the same number of users is getting better bandwidth.
Yes, I think that’s right. I don’t know why it wasn’t detected as a larger problem before now. Because of the nature of the bug, it may be that it wasn’t a bigger problem when there were fewer overall users.
I don’t think it’s a 5–6× increase in bandwidth for all users or all proxies. More like 2× on average. Your proxies might be disproportionately affected if they have good connectivity.
I am not aware of any, but I can testify to it myself.
That’s fine. Shut down however many proxies you need to stay within your resource limits. I have little doubt that the snowflake#40262 deployment is the cause of traffic changes you are seeing. I restarted the process myself and watched the bandwidth use immediately increase as a result.
Thanks for running Snowflake proxies.