The slow speed has mainly to do with resource overload at the bridge, which the anti-censorship team is working on. There is also a little bit of a problem with having sufficient proxies with unrestricted NATs.
At Graphs of user counts from Iran since the onset of shutdowns you can see how the number of Snowflake users has increased in the last few days. In the below graph you can see how bandwidth at the bridge has increased. The blue lines show where the server was restarted for upgrades; you can see what specifically happened at the Metrics Timeline. If you test during the times when the bridge is not overloaded, around 02:00 UTC, you will find that speeds are faster.
Here is more information about the work that has been done and the work that is in progress to keep the bridge running under the greatly increased load:
- [anti-censorship-team] Need to increase number of tor instances on snowflake-01 bridge, increased usage since yesterday and other messages in the thread
- Profile snowflake-server and attempt to reduce CPU and heap usage
- Increase number of tor instances from 4 to 8 on snowflake-01 bridge
- Deploy snowflake-server performance improvements 2022-09-23
- Deploy further snowflake-server performance improvements 2022-09-24
- Increase number of tor instances from 8 to 12 on snowflake-01 bridge
- snowflake-01 planned hardware maintenance (installed more RAM)
- Handle unknown client NAT type better to reduce load on restricted proxy pool
- Reduce turbotunnel queueSize from 2048 to 512
- snowflake-01: Connect the other NIC and move wireguard and sshd to it