So I recently enabled AES NI in BIOS settings on the hardware, and I noticed a much faster connection time through bridges, and also less issues inside tor logs. Has anyone else also experienced this? (I experienced this specifically on snowflake)
Just on Snowflake or on obfs4 / WebTunnel bridges as well?
Yes, faster AES could increase connection speed, because of how many layers of encryption Tor uses (Snowflake + 3 Tor relays).
Tor uses AES: Preliminaries - Tor Specifications.
Snowflake also does: webrtc package - github.com/pion/webrtc/v4 - Go Packages.
However, I can’t tell how much of a bottleneck AES can be in this context.
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AES-NI is heavily needed for most crypto operations, otherwise the CPU has to calculate it manually. There is a lot of cheap dedicated hardware to rent out there, one of the most important things to look at, is if the CPU has AES-NI already, otherwise you won’t get much traffic because of high CPU-load, thus saturation of the processor.
A performance analysis using the Crypto++ security library showed an increase in throughput from approximately 28.0 cycles per byte to 3.5 cycles per byte with AES/GCM versus a Pentium 4 with no acceleration.
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Just snowflake, other bridges in my region work poorly (I already filed reports to support team though)
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