Objective 1: Improve user-facing performance metrics by streamlining the tuning of the Tor network.
We have developed and deployed a series of improvements to the Tor network over the years, but as the network has changed, so has the impact of these improvements. We need to tune these improvements on the live Tor network as it exists today (larger, more users) so that our users can experience faster connections. By creating an easy way to tune and re-tune, we will be able to make user-facing performance improvements now, as well as easily replicate these actions in the future, ensuring we are always bringing performance improvements to our users through continuous evaluation and adjustment.
Additionally, through our existing set of Tor performance metrics recording, we will use the results from this live network tuning to calibrate the network models of Tor network simulators. This calibration will allow us to perform, evaluate, and conduct other objectives of this project for less simulation compute time cost, and with more confidence in our simulated results.
To do so, we will: