Objective 4: Improve our ability to proactively detect, diagnose, and resolve user-facing performance issues.
Under this objective, we will improve the way we monitor the health of the Tor network. The more insight we have into the health of the network, the faster we can detect and diagnose performance-related problems that impact our users. The goal of this objective is to identify and fix user-facing performance problems we can immediately address and to improve our ability to respond quickly to future performance issues.
Many user-facing performance problems can be detected by regular scans of the Tor network, to ensure that all Exit relays are able to quickly and reliably complete DNS resolutions and make network connections, and ensure that all middle relays are functioning normally. Additionally, Tor relays will be updated so that they automatically self-report when they are experiencing CPU, memory, or spare connection count shortages, for use in Objective 2 and in analysis.
Results from these scans and automated relay self-reporting will be made available to relay operators in abbreviated form in the Tor Metrics Relay Search portal, so that operators can get immediate feedback about any common issues that are detected. We will also conduct outreach to specific operators whose relays are experiencing major problems. Extended results will be available via developer tools to help diagnose any connectivity issues that may be due to underlying Tor bugs.
This improved network monitoring will uncover numerous operational issues and minor Tor bugs, and will likely find some major bugs as well. It will also support the development of the other objectives of this project, by helping us to ensure that our network remains healthy as we scale and improve performance. Thus, the final sub-objective is to fix any user-impacting performance issues uncovered through this monitoring and diagnosis.
To do this, we will: