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This ticket describes the Bandwidth Authority Refactoring Project.

Goals: Replace pyTorCtl with stem[1] or txtorcon Address Critical Issues Address Scalability Issues Implement New Feedback Mechanisms

Critical: Bandwith Authorities are leaving 10 percent of the network unmeasured https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13450

Understand how accurate the bandwidth authority estimates are
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7177

The slowest fraction of the network takes 18 hours to complete
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9795

BwAuth takes a long time to scan the network
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13449

Make a torflow option that starts every testing circuit at a local Tor relay first
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9762

Decentralize: Decentralized measurement for network load balancing https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/5464 Parallelise:
Split BwAuth children more equally https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3440

Increase the number of parallel scanners in a BandwidthAuthority from 4 to 8
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9795

Feedback Mechanisms: Implement bwauth cap for latency
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4708

Implement bwauth cap for TCP socket exhaustion
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4709

Bwauth: Use only "slow" measurements for positive feedback
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4730

Bandwidth auths should publish average and weighted onionskin failure rates
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7281

Detect overtuned exit relays
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10791

untracked issues?: Scalability - how are the BwAuths scaling? How long does this take? How much longer will it take with 10000 relays? Network stability? Circuit failure rates? Partition detection?

papers: EigenSpeed: Secure Peer-to-peer Bandwidth Evaluation https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/iptps09/tech/full_papers/snader/snader.pdf http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~nrl/CapProbe/

Requirements and Software Design for a Better Tor Performance Measurement Tool
https://research.torproject.org/techreports/torperf2-2013-10-30.pdf

[1] stem is "is a synchronous (threaded) Python library". There is/was? a plan to integrate it with txtorcon[2].

[2] https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#txtorcon-stemIntegration