5 ms·

I haven't used TOR recently but from my memory one of the biggest issues with is was speed. Yes you get anonymity but websites also load 2-3x slower because the

I haven't used TOR recently but from my memory one of the biggest issues with is was speed. Yes you get anonymity but websites also load 2-3x slower because they have to go through all the nodes on the network. The people that care about privacy at the expense of speed already use TOR, and for everyone else it's going to be a very hard sell.

teddyh 3y ago
In my experience Tor has not been slow for years now.
- nebulous1 3y ago
  Tor is faster than it used to be but this person is not wrong. 2-3x slower is a conservative estimate.
  - causi 3y ago
    Yeah I was going to say, if Tor is only 3x slower I'm switching right now. Last time I used it it was on the order of 20x slower.
    - flagrant_taco 3y ago
      I think it's heavily dependant on the site you're using. Loading this page in Firefox on android with a pretty crappy connection took ~2 seconds. In the Tor browser it was ~6seconds Definitely slower and this is a pretty minimal page, but I've got a hunch it really starts to choke when a page is loading a ton of different css/js assets at load
    - metalforever 3y ago
      No its not this slow . You can basically use to to web browse normally , even on heavy js pages.
      - holmesworcester 3y ago
        What's still often slow in Tor is making initial connections to hidden (onion) services. Last year during a DDoS attack on Tor this was unreasonably slow and took minutes or more, at which point sites just appeared broken. Once connected, though, it would still work pretty well. So if your experience is using Tor to access onion services you might have an inflated idea of its slowness for normal purposes. Visits to normal websites were only somewhat affected and were still pretty reliable.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      I use it regularly and don't find the latency that painful, though not negligible.
- notyourwork 3y ago
  Not been slow compared to what? It's been slow for me any time I've tried it.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    Compared to regular non-Tor web browsing. But impressions are subjective, I suppose.
    - notyourwork 3y ago
      I don't think they are subjective at all. Tor is inherently slow based on how it works. It has gotten faster since inception but even in last year or two it is a multiple slower. Until that is non-existent adoption will be challenging at best.
      - teddyh 3y ago
        What I’m saying is that Tor used to be, many years ago, annoyingly slow, sometimes even excruciatingly so. But today I don’t even notice that I’m using Tor. It might be “a multiple” slower, but I don’t notice it, is my point.
- bogtog 3y ago
  Much faster than in the past, but still annoyingly slow by all means
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
shrimp_emoji 3y ago
Yep. Decentralization entails degraded service, almost as a thermodynamic principle. It's the "eating your vegetables" of technology; even if you think people should, you can guess how many actually do.
- dahart 3y ago
  Why do you believe decentralization is responsible for TOR’s speed? Decentralization often improves speed by routing around traffic, and the regular non-TOR internet is decentralized. BitTorrent is often faster than regular internet due to its additional decentralization of the data. I suspect TOR is slow due to intentionally long and twisty routes, added encryption, extra hops that require more processing, low numbers of exit nodes, and limited bandwidth at the exit nodes. In a way, the speed is probably partly a byproduct of TOR accidentally centralizing traffic at the scarce exit nodes.
  - shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    > the regular non-TOR internet is decentralized All this stuff is on the Internet, so the Internet's decentralization is a floor that we can build further decentralization on top of. But wouldn't a hypothetical direct data link to somewhere be faster than using the Internet to get there? It'd be more brittle, yes. It can go down with little fault tolerance; it can't serve someone else; it can be trivially MITM'd. These are the downsides of centralization and the upsides of decentralization. > BitTorrent is often faster than regular internet I torrent a lot, and one thing that doesn't come to mind is "fast". You can stream 4K movies on Netflix. I'm betting you can't do that as well with a torrent... > I suspect TOR is slow due to intentionally long and twisty routes, added encryption, extra hops that require more processing, low numbers of exit nodes, and limited bandwidth at the exit nodes. In a way, the speed is probably partly a byproduct of TOR accidentally centralizing traffic at the scarce exit nodes. Like with torrenting or Bitcoin or PeerTube or whatever, you've listed a bunch of extra complexity that's all corollary to the thing being decentralized and necessarily making it slower. :p A lot more has to happen to solve a harder coordination problem. You end up using random, non-industrial grade relays. It's more complex, and it's going to be slower. What does that buy you though? Resilience, like if a relay goes down. Flexibility, like if you wanna use a different relay to circumvent a geolock. Privacy, in that it's much harder for an adversary to monitor you. There's no free lunch for those things, though, tragically, and they're secondary/tertiary on many people's priority list.
xur17 3y ago
Latency is bad, throughput is pretty decent. Unfortunately this is a side effect of it's routing system (routing through 3 random nodes around the world).
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  Latency is actually pretty reasonable once you're connected. Connection times are where most people really feel the slowness with Tor. For example, chat and SPA's are pretty snappy over Tor.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
guestbest 3y ago
There is no anonymity with tor if there is logging. There is only Obfuscation for most use cases. The latency makes is also have poor appeal. An untrusted internet or a hostile network isn’t going to change because there is a pretext of anonymity. I personally think highly trusted peers are the only solution.
randomuser23423 3y ago
In my experience, TOR's been fine for latency, but the problem I've been having is getting stuck in an infinite loop of Cloudflare "Checking if the site connection is secure."
- chii 3y ago
  There just isnt enough exit nodes that cloud providers have opted to either blacklist, or heavily deprioritize those nodes' traffic. I'd want to see every computer connected to the internet turn into an exit node! It makes it infeasible to block those IPs, and also prevents people from being charged a crime for such traffic.
  - hellojesus 3y ago
    > prevents people from being charged a crime for such traffic. Depending on the jurisdiction, this may not be true. In any case it could cause punishment by forcing the exit node operator to get the runaround of the legal system. Also it is conceivable that governments would update laws to make it illegal, if there was such an impact to NSA data collection to warrant it. It's a nice thought and running an exit node is on my short term to do list, but I also recognize the costs associated with it and what it may mean for my family.

teddyh 3y ago

In my experience Tor has not been slow for years now.

nebulous1 3y ago
Tor is faster than it used to be but this person is not wrong. 2-3x slower is a conservative estimate.
- causi 3y ago
  Yeah I was going to say, if Tor is only 3x slower I'm switching right now. Last time I used it it was on the order of 20x slower.
  - flagrant_taco 3y ago
    I think it's heavily dependant on the site you're using. Loading this page in Firefox on android with a pretty crappy connection took ~2 seconds. In the Tor browser it was ~6seconds Definitely slower and this is a pretty minimal page, but I've got a hunch it really starts to choke when a page is loading a ton of different css/js assets at load
  - metalforever 3y ago
    No its not this slow . You can basically use to to web browse normally , even on heavy js pages.
    - holmesworcester 3y ago
      What's still often slow in Tor is making initial connections to hidden (onion) services. Last year during a DDoS attack on Tor this was unreasonably slow and took minutes or more, at which point sites just appeared broken. Once connected, though, it would still work pretty well. So if your experience is using Tor to access onion services you might have an inflated idea of its slowness for normal purposes. Visits to normal websites were only somewhat affected and were still pretty reliable.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    I use it regularly and don't find the latency that painful, though not negligible.
notyourwork 3y ago
Not been slow compared to what? It's been slow for me any time I've tried it.
- teddyh 3y ago
  Compared to regular non-Tor web browsing. But impressions are subjective, I suppose.
  - notyourwork 3y ago
    I don't think they are subjective at all. Tor is inherently slow based on how it works. It has gotten faster since inception but even in last year or two it is a multiple slower. Until that is non-existent adoption will be challenging at best.
    - teddyh 3y ago
      What I’m saying is that Tor used to be, many years ago, annoyingly slow, sometimes even excruciatingly so. But today I don’t even notice that I’m using Tor. It might be “a multiple” slower, but I don’t notice it, is my point.
bogtog 3y ago
Much faster than in the past, but still annoyingly slow by all means
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

shrimp_emoji 3y ago

Yep. Decentralization entails degraded service, almost as a thermodynamic principle. It's the "eating your vegetables" of technology; even if you think people should, you can guess how many actually do.

dahart 3y ago
Why do you believe decentralization is responsible for TOR’s speed? Decentralization often improves speed by routing around traffic, and the regular non-TOR internet is decentralized. BitTorrent is often faster than regular internet due to its additional decentralization of the data. I suspect TOR is slow due to intentionally long and twisty routes, added encryption, extra hops that require more processing, low numbers of exit nodes, and limited bandwidth at the exit nodes. In a way, the speed is probably partly a byproduct of TOR accidentally centralizing traffic at the scarce exit nodes.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  > the regular non-TOR internet is decentralized All this stuff is on the Internet, so the Internet's decentralization is a floor that we can build further decentralization on top of. But wouldn't a hypothetical direct data link to somewhere be faster than using the Internet to get there? It'd be more brittle, yes. It can go down with little fault tolerance; it can't serve someone else; it can be trivially MITM'd. These are the downsides of centralization and the upsides of decentralization. > BitTorrent is often faster than regular internet I torrent a lot, and one thing that doesn't come to mind is "fast". You can stream 4K movies on Netflix. I'm betting you can't do that as well with a torrent... > I suspect TOR is slow due to intentionally long and twisty routes, added encryption, extra hops that require more processing, low numbers of exit nodes, and limited bandwidth at the exit nodes. In a way, the speed is probably partly a byproduct of TOR accidentally centralizing traffic at the scarce exit nodes. Like with torrenting or Bitcoin or PeerTube or whatever, you've listed a bunch of extra complexity that's all corollary to the thing being decentralized and necessarily making it slower. :p A lot more has to happen to solve a harder coordination problem. You end up using random, non-industrial grade relays. It's more complex, and it's going to be slower. What does that buy you though? Resilience, like if a relay goes down. Flexibility, like if you wanna use a different relay to circumvent a geolock. Privacy, in that it's much harder for an adversary to monitor you. There's no free lunch for those things, though, tragically, and they're secondary/tertiary on many people's priority list.

xur17 3y ago

Latency is bad, throughput is pretty decent. Unfortunately this is a side effect of it's routing system (routing through 3 random nodes around the world).

holmesworcester 3y ago
Latency is actually pretty reasonable once you're connected. Connection times are where most people really feel the slowness with Tor. For example, chat and SPA's are pretty snappy over Tor.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

guestbest 3y ago

There is no anonymity with tor if there is logging. There is only Obfuscation for most use cases. The latency makes is also have poor appeal. An untrusted internet or a hostile network isn’t going to change because there is a pretext of anonymity. I personally think highly trusted peers are the only solution.

randomuser23423 3y ago

In my experience, TOR's been fine for latency, but the problem I've been having is getting stuck in an infinite loop of Cloudflare "Checking if the site connection is secure."

chii 3y ago
There just isnt enough exit nodes that cloud providers have opted to either blacklist, or heavily deprioritize those nodes' traffic. I'd want to see every computer connected to the internet turn into an exit node! It makes it infeasible to block those IPs, and also prevents people from being charged a crime for such traffic.
- hellojesus 3y ago
  > prevents people from being charged a crime for such traffic. Depending on the jurisdiction, this may not be true. In any case it could cause punishment by forcing the exit node operator to get the runaround of the legal system. Also it is conceivable that governments would update laws to make it illegal, if there was such an impact to NSA data collection to warrant it. It's a nice thought and running an exit node is on my short term to do list, but I also recognize the costs associated with it and what it may mean for my family.