Hello everyone,
I’m a new member of the Tor community, and I’m excited to learn more about how to contribute and improve my experience. I’m currently running Tor on a high-performance Windows 11 laptop with a fast SSD and plenty of disk space. I also have a good internet connection.
I was hoping someone could point me in the direction of an official Tor manual, if one exists?
More importantly, I’m looking for some advice on how to speed up my Browse, especially when trying to access .onion sites. I’m literally waiting hours sometimes, and it’s making it very difficult to use. I’ve already tried switching between different bridges and frequently creating new circuits, but neither seems to make a significant difference.
Any tips or guidance on improving speed would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance.
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A good starting point could be https://support.torproject.org/ or, specifically for Tor Browser, https://tb-manual.torproject.org/. If you have secific needs, feel free share them, so that we can point you to more relevant resources.
About the speed, I recommend you not to use bridges (unless you are victim of Tor censorship, of course): this way you drop one hop you don’t need, which also often happens to be the slowest in the chain.
Other than that, there’s not much you can do, since the main limits on bandwidth depends on running relays and ongoing DoS attacks. Also, some websites intentionally delay Tor users (though this doesn’t apply to onion ones, I guess).
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Thank you for the detailed and helpful response!
I initially thought that bridges might help with speed, so that’s interesting to hear your recommendation against using them unless facing censorship.
@Eldalie, is there a recommended time of day for using Tor to potentially achieve better speeds?
Bridges are designed specifically to bypass censorship against Tor (1), and have the known (inherent?) downside of slowing down the connection (2). This is one of the two reasons why you should not use them if you are not facing censorship (the other is that this way you leave more bandwidth available for those who actually need a bridge).
I guess there is a time when Tor is faster because it is used by less people, but I have no idea when it could be. I personally don’t see any time-related variation in speed, but I think this is not relevant. I hope someone else can provide more useful info about this.
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Circuits to connect to Onion services (more accurate than onion sites, but is basically the same) are twice as long as those used to connect to “normal” websites (6 hops vs 3), so it’s normal for them to be slower.
Hours for loading is surely out of scale, though - also because the connection should time out much earlier. If an Onion services is so slow, the issue is probably in the server, not in the Tor network.
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