We estimate the number of users by analyzing the requests induced by clients to relays and bridges.
This graph shows the estimated number of clients connecting via bridges. These numbers are derived from directory requests counted on bridges. Bridges resolve client IP addresses of incoming directory requests to country codes, and they distinguish connecting clients by transport protocol, which may include pluggable transports. Even though bridges don't report a combination of clients by country and transport, it's possible to derive and graph lower and upper bounds from existing usage statistics. For further details check the documentation on Reproducible Metrics.
The following events have been manually collected in the metrics-timeline Git repository and might be related to the displayed graph.
| Dates | Places/Protocols | Description and Links |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-09-30 to 2022-10-01 | snowflake |
Experiment with bypassing extor-static-cookie on the snowflake-01 bridge. Transport- and country-specific metrics were not collected on the bridge during this time.
issue |
| 2022-09-30 | snowflake |
Restart of snowflake-server on the snowflake-01 bridge with a mitigation for ephemeral port exhaustion.
comment |
| 2022-09-30 | snowflake |
Restart of snowflake-server on the snowflake-01 bridge to restore a dual-stack configuration.
comment |
| 2022-09-30 | snowflake |
Temporary outage of the snowflake-01 bridge caused by adjusting network interfaces.
comment |
| 2022-09-29 | snowflake |
Reboot of snowflake-01 bridge and restarts of the snowflake-server process for maintenance.
comment |
| 2022-09-29 to 2022-10-31 |
When Tor Metrics introduced a new method of counting clients (to work with multi-instance relays like the Snowflake bridge), it required reprocessing stats in the overlapping months.
issue |
|
| 2022-09-29 | snowflake |
Redeployed snowflake-server on the snowflake-01 bridge, in an attempt to reduce memory allocation.
comment commit |
| 2022-09-28 | snowflake |
Testing an alternative WebSocket package on the snowflake-01 bridge.
comment |
| 2022-09-27 |
Tor Metrics gains the ability to process descriptors from multi-instance relays (like the Snowflake bridge).
merge request issue |
|
| 2022-09-27 | snowflake |
Redeployed snowflake-server on the snowflake-01 bridge, reducing the per-client packet send queue size from 2048 to 512.
comment |
| 2022-09-26 | snowflake |
RAM upgrade on snowflake-01 bridge.
issue |
| 2022-09-26 | ir obfs4 snowflake |
Made Snowflake the preferred transport in Connection Assist for Iran (was obfs4).
merge request |
| 2022-09-24 | snowflake |
Increased the number of tor instances on the snowflake-01 bridge from 8 to 12.
comment mailing list post |
| 2022-09-24 | snowflake |
Redeployed snowflake-server on the snowflake-01 bridge, with further memory use optimizations.
comment |
| 2022-09-23 | snowflake |
Redeployed snowflake-server on the snowflake-01 bridge, reducing the keepalive timeout from 10 minutes to 4 minutes.
comment |
| 2022-09-23 | snowflake |
Redeployed snowflake-server on the snowflake-01 bridge, disabling profiling and raising the keepalive timeout from 2 minutes to 10 minutes.
comment |
| 2022-09-23 | snowflake |
Deployed memory use optimizations and enabled profiling on the snowflake-01 bridge. Reduced the keepalive timeout from 10 minutes to 2 minutes. Increased the size of the clientID-to-IP map from 10240 to 98304.
comment |
| 2022-09-22 | snowflake |
Increased the number of tor instances on the snowflake-01 bridge from 4 to 8.
mailing list post comment |
| 2022-08-12 |
Release of tor 0.4.5.14, 0.4.6.12 and 0.4.7.10, with a fix to the geoip database.
announcement |
|
| 2022-08-12 | ipv4 ipv6 |
geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "IPFire Project Tue, 09 Aug 2022 06:11:25 GMT" (geoip-db-digest 0AE7077313A53103C2B32100D74AAFC04216289D, geoip6-db-digest DCBF1789BF1EEB03276B830CB2AB92BCF779D97F).
commit |
| 2022-08-11 |
Release of tor 0.4.5.13, 0.4.6.11 and 0.4.7.9, with congestion control changes aimed at mitigating the DDoS attack that started 2022-06-06.
announcement |
|
| 2022-08-11 | ipv4 ipv6 |
geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "IPFire Project Thu, 11 Aug 2022 05:41:58 GMT" (geoip-db-digest A642DB3FC558C9C609159064A32CD4FBCA254CCA, geoip6-db-digest C8CB9E5727CCE1479D595EBFEF5D9AAC1C9B9E94).
commit |
| 2022-08-10 | ipv4 ipv6 |
geoip and geoip6 databases updated to "IPFire Project Fri, 17 Jun 2022 06:11:30 GMT" (geoip-db-digest C8CC32FB272CDC7D2C310839D3BE02C49053918D, geoip6-db-digest 0CC43D240A9A4B2B218A8A6DA20EA03EE0BB6912).
commit |
| 2022-08-05 | China obfs4 Unknown |
Sudden drop in access to bridges from the "https" pool from China.
comment bridge graph |
| 2022-07-14 | Bridges |
Release of Tor Browser 11.5, with a new Connection Assist feature for automatic censorship circumvention configuration.
blog post graph of effect on Snowflake initial country-specific settings initial default settings |
| 2022-06-27 | snowflake |
Release of Snowflake WebExtension 0.6.0. The main feature added in this release was support for more than one bridge. It had a bug that caused it to stop reporting client IP addresses, which caused a fraction of Snowflake usage to be attributed to the unknown country ?? in metrics, rather than being properly geolocated.
archive merge request issue |
| 2022-06-17 |
Release of tor 0.4.7.8, fixing a DoS vulnerability relating to the new congestion control in 0.4.7.7 (TROVE-2022-001, CVE-2022-33903.
announcement issue |
|
| 2022-06-16 | snowflake |
Began periodic restarts of Snowflake's probetest NAT measurement service, which increased the success rate of proxies self-measuring their NAT type.
issue comment |
| 2022-06-06 to 2023-04-05 |
Network-wide DDoS attack.
status.torproject.org issue forum thread graph onion v3 traffic |
|
| 2022-01-12 to 2022-08-08 | webstats Unknown |
Tor Browser update pings drop temporarily. A similar effect is present in other years.
graph issue issue |
| 2021-06-10 to present |
Experiment to test latencies between relays.
status.torproject.org post announcing start |
|
| 2021-01-01 to present | China snowflake Unknown |
Increased failure to bootstrap using Snowflake from China.
comment |
| 2018-09-26 to present | fte |
Outage of default FTE bridge 128.105.214.162:8080.
comment |
| 2018-09-26 to present | fte |
Outage of default FTE bridge 128.105.214.163:8080.
comment |
| 2018-01-05 to present |
Outage of the op-hk OnionPerf instance.
op-hk graph |
|
| 2017-12-04 to present |
DDoS attack creates load on the network.
tor-relays thread relay graph summary post ticket |
|
| 2017-02-10 to present | OR exit |
Measurement error from bandwidth authority causes decrease in measured bandwidth in Europe.
mailing list post |
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