# Snowflake proxy connections limit

**URL:** https://forum.torproject.org/t/snowflake-proxy-connections-limit/4113
**Category:** Relay Operator
**Tags:** snowflake
**Created:** [July 28, 2022, 12:53pm UTC](https://forum.torproject.org/t/snowflake-proxy-connections-limit/4113 "2022-07-28T12:53:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 5

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### Author: ![arma](https://forum.torproject.org/user_avatar/forum.torproject.org/arma/32/25_2.png) [@arma](https://forum.torproject.org/u/arma)
#### Post date: [September 24, 2022, 6:40pm UTC](https://forum.torproject.org/t/snowflake-proxy-connections-limit/4113/5 "2022-09-24T18:40:45Z")

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> It looks more like different frequency of (single-threaded?) polling of the same broker, than using several brokers.

Right – there is one Snowflake broker, which clients reach via domain fronting and which Snowflakes reach directly.

Different frequency of polling is half of the story. The other half is that the Snowflakes running in browser extensions have a limit of one client they can serve at once, whereas the headless Snowflake have a configurable limit of how many clients to serve in parallel. See the “-capacity” argument to the ./proxy command:

> **[proxy · main · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports /...](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/tree/main/proxy)**
>
> Pluggable Transport using WebRTC, inspired by Flashproxy.

which looks like it defaults to 0:

> **[proxy/main.go · main · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable...](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/blob/main/proxy/main.go#L17)**
>
> Pluggable Transport using WebRTC, inspired by Flashproxy.

which I believe means “no limit”.

Load balancing is handled at the broker end: snowflakes say how many clients they’re handling right now when they check in with the broker, so the broker has the opportunity to assign clients to less-loaded snowflakes. I think the load balancing approach is very simple currently.

And as a last note, you can read a big pile of wishlist items on the gitlab tickets:

> **[Issues · The Tor Project / Anti-censorship / Pluggable Transports / Snowflake...](https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowflake/-/issues/)**
>
> Pluggable Transport using WebRTC, inspired by Flashproxy.

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