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author | Roger Dingledine <arma@torproject.org> | 2008-10-02 11:29:30 +0000 |
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committer | Roger Dingledine <arma@torproject.org> | 2008-10-02 11:29:30 +0000 |
commit | 585493786ccf956471e188c565ff792b26c39cbb (patch) | |
tree | c0ca4f52cebf327f5a72814a1744d68f77ff003b /proposals/155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt | |
parent | 20b0a94f5184808714ef69dd6a7de554e3cc5882 (diff) | |
download | torspec-585493786ccf956471e188c565ff792b26c39cbb.tar.gz torspec-585493786ccf956471e188c565ff792b26c39cbb.zip |
add karsten's proposal 155, after giving it a more unique name
svn:r17032
Diffstat (limited to 'proposals/155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt')
-rw-r--r-- | proposals/155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt | 122 |
1 files changed, 122 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/proposals/155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt b/proposals/155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6d681f8 --- /dev/null +++ b/proposals/155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt @@ -0,0 +1,122 @@ +Filename: 155-four-hidden-service-improvements.txt +Title: Four Improvements of Hidden Service Performance +Version: $Revision$ +Last-Modified: $Date$ +Author: Karsten Loesing, Christian Wilms +Created: 25-Sep-2008 +Status: Open +Target: 0.2.1.x + +Change history: + + 25-Sep-2008 Initial proposal for or-dev + +Overview: + + A performance analysis of hidden services [1] has brought up a few + possible design changes to reduce advertisement time of a hidden service + in the network as well as connection establishment time. Some of these + design changes have side-effects on anonymity or overall network load + which had to be weighed up against individual performance gains. A + discussion of seven possible design changes [2] has lead to a selection + of four changes [3] that are proposed to be implemented here. + +Design: + + 1. Shorter Circuit Extension Timeout + + When establishing a connection to a hidden service a client cannibalizes + an existing circuit and extends it by one hop to one of the service's + introduction points. In most cases this can be accomplished within a few + seconds. Therefore, the current timeout of 60 seconds for extending a + circuit is far too high. + + Assuming that the timeout would be reduced to a lower value, for example + 30 seconds, a second (or third) attempt to cannibalize and extend would + be started earlier. With the current timeout of 60 seconds, 93.42% of all + circuits can be established, whereas this fraction would have been only + 0.87% smaller at 92.55% with a timeout of 30 seconds. + + For a timeout of 30 seconds the performance gain would be approximately 2 + seconds in the mean as opposed to the current timeout of 60 seconds. At + the same time a smaller timeout leads to discarding an increasing number + of circuits that might have been completed within the current timeout of + 60 seconds. + + Measurements with simulated low-bandwidth connectivity have shown that + there is no significant effect of client connectivity on circuit + extension times. The reason for this might be that extension messages are + small and thereby independent of the client bandwidth. Further, the + connection between client and entry node only constitutes a single hop of + a circuit, so that its influence on the whole circuit is limited. + + The exact value of the new timeout does not necessarily have to be 30 + seconds, but might also depend on the results of circuit build timeout + measurements as described in proposal 151. + + 2. Parallel Connections to Introduction Points + + An additional approach to accelerate extension of introduction circuits + is to extend a second circuit in parallel to a different introduction + point. Such parallel extension attempts should be started after a short + delay of, e.g., 15 seconds in order to prevent unnecessary circuit + extensions and thereby save network resources. Whichever circuit + extension succeeds first is used for introduction, while the other + attempt is aborted. + + An evaluation has been performed for the more resource-intensive approach + of starting two parallel circuits immediately instead of waiting for a + short delay. The result was a reduction of connection establishment times + from 27.4 seconds in the original protocol to 22.5 seconds. + + While the effect of the proposed approach of delayed parallelization on + mean connection establishment times is expected to be smaller, + variability of connection attempt times can be reduced significantly. + + 3. Increase Count of Internal Circuits + + Hidden services need to create or cannibalize and extend a circuit to a + rendezvous point for every client request. Really popular hidden services + require more than two internal circuits in the pool to answer multiple + client requests at the same time. This scenario was not yet analyzed, but + will probably exhibit worse performance than measured in the previous + analysis. The number of preemptively built internal circuits should be a + function of connection requests in the past to adapt to changing needs. + Furthermore, an increased number of internal circuits on client side + would allow clients to establish connections to more than one hidden + service at a time. + + Under the assumption that a popular hidden service cannot make use of + cannibalization for connecting to rendezvous points, the circuit creation + time needs to be added to the current results. In the mean, the + connection establishment time to a popular hidden service would increase + by 4.7 seconds. + + 4. Build More Introduction Circuits + + When establishing introduction points, a hidden service should launch 5 + instead of 3 introduction circuits at the same time and use only the + first 3 that could be established. The remaining two circuits could still + be used for other purposes afterwards. + + The effect has been simulated using previously measured data, too. + Therefore, circuit establishment times were derived from log files and + written to an array. Afterwards, a simulation with 10,000 runs was + performed picking 5 (4, 6) random values and using the 3 lowest values in + contrast to picking only 3 values at random. The result is that the mean + time of the 3-out-of-3 approach is 8.1 seconds, while the mean time of + the 3-out-of-5 approach is 4.4 seconds. + + The effect on network load is minimal, because the hidden service can + reuse the slower internal circuits for other purposes, e.g., rendezvous + circuits. The only change is that a hidden service starts establishing + more circuits at once instead of subsequently doing so. + +References: + + [1] http://freehaven.net/~karsten/hidserv/perfanalysis-2008-06-15.pdf + + [2] http://freehaven.net/~karsten/hidserv/discussion-2008-07-15.pdf + + [3] http://freehaven.net/~karsten/hidserv/design-2008-08-15.pdf + |