now I have installed Tor on my firewall (sparc debian woody), and it seems t
o work. However,
traffic is very slow. Do other tor-users the same problem?

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On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:12:01 GMT, in article
<R67gd.121$aJ.5016@typhoon.bart.nl>, sss <sss@sssss.ss> wrote:

>now I have installed Tor on my firewall (sparc debian woody), and it seems 
to work. However,
>traffic is very slow. Do other tor-users the same problem?
>

Yes, it is slow.

Why exactly would you expect it *not* to be?

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John Smith wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:12:01 GMT, in article
> <R67gd.121$aJ.5016@typhoon.bart.nl>, sss <sss@sssss.ss> wrote:
>
> 
>
>
> Yes, it is slow.
>
> Why exactly would you expect it *not* to be?

Because I don't know exactly what is involved? I am not /that/ much
of a genius :-)  As far as I understand it, the http-requests get bounced
a few times between tor-servers, but twenty or thirty seconds seems a
bit excessive. Half of the URLs I address time out before connection
is made and I am on cable.

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On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:30:59 GMT
sss <sss@sssss.ss> wrote:

> John Smith wrote: 
>
> Because I don't know exactly what is involved? I am not /that/ much
> of a genius :-)  As far as I understand it, the http-requests get
> bounced a few times between tor-servers, but twenty or thirty seconds
> seems a bit excessive. Half of the URLs I address time out before
> connection is made and I am on cable.

Well I am on dial up only and yes using Tor is slower which is to be
expected, but even I have yet to receive a time out on any web site.


>
>

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On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 16:30:59 GMT, in article
<799gd.131$aJ.4953@typhoon.bart.nl>, sss <sss@sssss.ss> wrote:
 
>
>Because I don't know exactly what is involved? I am not /that/ much
>of a genius :-)  As far as I understand it, the http-requests get bounced
>a few times between tor-servers, but twenty or thirty seconds seems a
>bit excessive. Half of the URLs I address time out before connection
>is made and I am on cable.
>

I haven't experienced any web sites timing out (I don't think tor is
*that* slow   but I often see messages in the tor window about
streams being 15 seconds late. This often coincides with a website
taking ages to load.

TBH I think with the increased publicity tor has received of late, it
has had an impact on the speed a bit. 6-9 months ago tor seemed to be
generally faster than it is now.

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In article <799gd.131$aJ.4953@typhoon.bart.nl>, sss@sssss.ss says...
> John Smith wrote: 
>
> Because I don't know exactly what is involved? I am not /that/ much
> of a genius :-)  As far as I understand it, the http-requests get bounced
> a few times between tor-servers, but twenty or thirty seconds seems a
> bit excessive. Half of the URLs I address time out before connection
> is made and I am on cable.
>
>
>
Any proxy will be slower than direct connect purely because it has extra
hops to go through.  The way a proxy works is that you request the data,
it goes and gets it, downloads it and uploads it to you (and if a
filtering proxy it will download/rewrite/upload).  All those extra steps
guarantee it will be slower than direct connect in nearly all instances
(one instance it may not be is if a route from you to the site is
buggered, but from the proxy to the site is fine and you to the proxy is
also fine).

The biggest impact on speed is the number of users, they all share the
bandwidth.  So, taking Tor as the example, if one of the hops in Tor is
on a 3 MB pipe, but there are thousands of users going through that,
then each user is only going to get a very small fraction of that speed.
The more users, the slower it gets unless more resources/bandwidth are
added on the proxy side.  With Tor that means as more use it as clients,
it will get slower unless more also run servers.

There are far more factors that will affect your perceived speed through
a proxy, the above is a simplistic explanation, but it should give you a
good idea of why it is slower.

/steve
--
Check out Cotse's Privacy Watch.
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http://www.cotse.net/privacy/

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