Using Tor - initial perspective

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First thing I did with Tor was to check my IP address. Well it was hidden, GREAT.

Browsing various sites that I frequently visit, noticed Tor was slower than Firefox.

(i) Went to our website, as I know the code has no php or similar, all static site built with Hugo. Firefox 1.5 seconds to load, Tor - 44 seconds

Most of the ‘waiting’ was caused by google type URI’s , so I will check the code and see if this was actually sourced by the code within the website, or it was network traffic based.

(ii) Duck duck Go search - Firefox 2 seconds to complete, Tor 8 seconds (same search criteria)

These are just first impressions, not conclusive of course.

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The Tor browser, unlike Firefox, must pass your traffic through several nodes to the destination and back.

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Hello @jehoshua7,

first of all, tor is not meant to give you fast access to the internet. Tor enables a free and uncensored internet.

When checking performance, always keep the onion circuit in mind.

Loading remote resources always takes more time. This should be avoided.

A few days ago I came across a page that simply serves html. With this example you can see that you can be fast with Tor.
Look here: https://nascosto45qzucs3anw74vipa6td2e7ryjr7k6w3klgbcjx4n4osymid.onion/

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We are working on improving the performance of the Tor network. You can read about that project in Sponsor 61 - Making the Tor network faster & more reliable for users in Internet-repressive places · The Tor Project · GitLab

If you are interested in some of the metrics you were recording you can take a look at our metrics site on performance: Performance – Tor Metrics

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Hi @martln,

Thanks for your reply.

Thanks, I was looking for privacy and security, it seems Tor is very good for those needs.

Being new to Tor, I have no idea what the onion circuit is. Being a gardener of sorts, onions have deep roots. I’ll read up on it. But how would one avoid remote resources ? Even if a website appears ‘local’ and the server is local (same country), it can possibly have remote resources.

I’m getting a “Server not found” on that link.

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Hi @Gaba ,

Thanks for those links, very interesting. It seemed most of the ‘culprit’ pages trying to load that caused the delays were from google based sites like googlesyndication, etc. Assuming I can block those sites at a Tor level, will that help or hinder overall performance.

(Knowing that google syndication and similar sites are only ads)

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There’s an extension called Decentraleyes that serves JavaScript libraries from your local machine so that your web browser doesn’t need to retrieve/access them remotely.

Though do note that adding extensions to Tor Browser isn’t recommended.

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