Overview
This page provides instructions for reproducing our relay speed test analysis. See the front page for more context.
The speed test itself was run on the Tor network using some changes to Tor and a python controller script as discussed in the paper. Here are the components that we used when running the speed test.
- Post to tor-relays mailing list explaining the experiment
- Tor code branch implementing speed test support
- Script for running the actual speed test
The results are stored in speedtester.json.xz and are used in the analysis below, wherein we attempt to better understand the effects of the speed test.
Note: the data processing tasks in Steps 1-4 have already been done, and the output from those steps have been cached in this repository. If you just want to re-plot the graphs, do Step 0 and then skip to Step 5.
Step 0: prepare python virtual environment
python3 -m venv myenv
source myenv/bin/activate
pip3 install stem matplotlib numpy scipy
Step 1: download raw Tor metrics data
wget https://collector.torproject.org/archive/relay-descriptors/server-descriptors/server-descriptors-2019-08.tar.xz
wget https://collector.torproject.org/archive/relay-descriptors/consensuses/consensuses-2019-08.tar.xz
Step 2: decompress
tar xJf server-descriptors-2019-08.tar.xz
tar xJf consensuses-2019-08.tar.xz
Step 3: extract bandwidth info
source myenv/bin/activate
# output is tor.archive.json
python3 parse_tor_archive.py consensuses-2019-08 server-descriptors-2019-08
Step 4: compute
source myenv/bin/activate
# input is speedtester.json.xz, output is speedtest.measured.json.xz
python3 parse_measured.py
# input is speedtest.measured.json.xz and tor.archive.json
# output is speedtest.diffs.json.xz and advbw_over_time.json.xz
python3 process_speedtest.py
Step 5: plot the graphs
source myenv/bin/activate
# input is advbw_over_time.json.xz
python3 plot_speedtest_timeseries.py > stats_timeseries.txt
# input is speedtest.measured.json.xz, speedtest.diffs.json.xz,
# ../capacity_variation/relay_uptime.json.xz, and
# ../capacity_variation/relay_position.json.xz
python3 plot_speedtest_explore.py > stats_explore.txt