Tor is much slower latterly than it used to be

The metrics does show it to be decreasing, it was headed to go off the chart but now its dipped down to 40gb/s and is headed towards 30gb/s
https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.html?start=2022-05-01&end=2022-06-25

Will Tor Browser need an update that includes Tor 0.4.7.8 for users to take advantage of the security patch? (Noob question, I know).

Are you using invidious for videos? It seems that the issue isn’t with the Tor network, but with YouTube bottlenecking yt-dlp requests made from Tor exit nodes. Try with the normal YouTube website and see if you notice any difference.

I just noticed that I could get about 1 MB/s of download bandwidth (as observed from nyx) but Invidious videos would keep buffering every 5 seconds.

It is not just about watching videos or whatever, it is about Tor performance in general. Everything is slow, not just Invidious.

As Alexey104 mentioned everything is slow including YouTube. At times even interacting with a server via SSH has been slow.

Hello everyone, we’re trying a new network parameter to handle the extra traffic. @arma wrote about it here:

Let us know if your Tor looks happier. :slight_smile:

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Thank you for your hard work!
Unfortunately, right now I don’t observe any improvements, but maybe some time is needed for these changes to take effect? Am I correct thinking that no any additional settings are needed from the users’ side?

I’m seeing the change to two guards instead of one taking effect on both Tor Browser Stable and Alpha. But the two guards my Alpha browser was assigned are both still using old versions of Tor, 0.4.5.6 and 0.4.6.10 (one of them has an uptime of 326 (!!) days). Therefore the circuits I am handed will not take full advantage of the congestion control in 0.4.7.7+, am I right?

I was wrong, sorry for the misleading, just didn’t have enough time for testing. I actually see huge improvements in both tor 0.4.7.8 and tor-browser 11.0.14. Can see that both use two entry nodes. I’ve been using TB for an hour now, and it feels pretty good.

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Actually, your guards don’t need to be running the latest versions, to make use of the new congestion control stuff. Only the endpoints matter – (A) your client, and (B) your exit relay (or the onion service you’re talking to, if it’s an onion service you’re reaching).

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Thanks for the update. Could you please clarify what this means for us folks who use pluggable transports? Will this setting affect us if we have 2 bridge lines or more?

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Great point!

I believe the answer is yes, people who use bridges will now use two of them by default (if they have at least two configured).

Proposal 271 has all the gritty details of the new (as of Tor 0.3.0, in 2017) guard design:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/proposals/271-another-guard-selection.txt

(The goal of the prop271 guard design was to somehow avoid the attack where an adversary who controls your local network blocks connections to every guard in the consensus except the one(s) they control. The way the design works is that you grab a pretty small set of possible guards (dozens), and then you only choose your guard out of that set, and if you run out, you fail closed. Bridges re-use the same design, not because it is a great idea for bridges, but because it’s what the code does.)

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it seems the ddos stopped ? I’m seing less traffic on my relay on the past hours !

I can see a drastic improvement, videos no longer buffer and onion services are usable again (instead of taking 20 seconds or more just to start loading).

Is there a torrc line or something users can do to change back to guard-n-primary-guards-to-use=1, in cases where safety is more important than performance?

Yes.
Though its generally not advisable for obvious reason, if you find yourself needing to specify your first hop, use this.

EntryNode $fingerprint

Quoted from: circuit - How to change the entry node? - Tor Stack Exchange

Add this line to your torrc file, and restart tor. Verify in browser or tor logs that the circuit was built using the fingerprint provided and is in fact connecting to the entry node you want.

There are a few different ways to implement this idea/solution though, and you can specify multiple entry nodes and tor will pick from one on startup.

Look specifically at the ‘EntryNodes’ section on the man page, a quick hotkey for finding it is copy EntryNodes, control + f (command + F on Mac) and paste. Should be right next to strictnodes.

Or from terminal in linux, unix, Mac, or BSD, copy paste

man tor | grep --color=always -C 10 EntryNodes
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Too slowly

Hi @Mar-vellONE, please see: Network DDoS | Tor Project status

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Have they managed to figure out where/who its coming from yet? Its hard to tell if this is being done by agencies or criminals, not that there is often much difference between the two