Where to Download
Changes
Below are the major changes of the released versions and links to more detailed release notes.
Alpha
This is the fifth and most likely last alpha of the 0.4.7.x series. We’ve stabilized the congestion control work and fix last remaining issues. Read more about the congestion control work here:
Several bugfixes but one major change is worth mentioning affecting Exit relay and hopefully improve the UX of Tor users. Quoting the ChangeLog:
o Major bugfixes (relay, DNS):
- Lower the DNS timeout from 3 attempts at 5 seconds each to 2
attempts at 1 seconds each. Two new consensus parameters were
added to control these values. This change should improve observed
performance under DNS load; see ticket for more details. Fixes bug
40312; bugfix on 0.3.5.1-alpha.
Over the past months, we’ve observed that our Exit relays were seeing large number of DNS request timeouts leading to a poor UX experience for users on the other end of the circuits.
With this change, we hope that Exit relays will be able to react more quickly to DNS request that takes too long and let the client cycle to a better Exit that will complete in time the request. These parameters are also controllable with consensus parameters which means we can adjust these over time as we monitor the network.
Final note , we hope to release the first release candidate in the coming week(s) if everything goes well with this final alpha and then onto the stable version.