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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> You can stream 4K movies on Netflix. I'm betting you can't do that as well with a torrent...

Depends on the torrent. Any popular "Linux ISO" can easily saturate my 1400mbps download speed so I download the UHD bluray remux whenever it's available. Videos encoded at 100mbps look at a lot better on a high dpi display compared to Netflix's 10mbps "4K" and also doesn't limit you to clients that support DRM.

The UX isn't great, but if you select the "Download in sequential order" option you can start watching a torrent in 5 seconds while it downloads in the background

Bittorrent is fast because it can saturate your connection by downloading chunks from multiple connections the same way things like “axel” (wget alternative) and Download Accelerator apps accomplish it over http.

There isn’t an interesting statement on Bittorrent vs internet here. Browsers just don’t make this optimization themselves, probably because most files are small, but also out of respect for the single origin server.

But TOR isn’t really any more decentralized than the internet; and it might even be less decentralized due to exit node contention. Decentralization does not seem to have anything to do with TOR’s relatively slow speed, nor does decentralization seem to have any “thermodynamic principle” of slowing things down, right? The extra complexity of TOR is precisely the thing slowing it down, by design. (Well one of the things, scarce bandwidth is another - there have always been calls & pleas for more participation in order to increase the network’s bandwidth & capacity.)

We can’t exactly compare Netflix to an unnamed slow torrent of your choice in any fair or reasonable way given that Netflix is something like 15% of all internet traffic and is heavily optimized. The fair comparison is using BitTorrent to download a file compared to a direct http or ftp download from the original source/host - and for that BitTorrent usually wins handily in my experience. Plus I’ve definitely seen some popular torrents download much faster than anything Netflix has ever served me, in terms of bytes per second.

> You can stream 4K movies on Netflix. I'm betting you can't do that as well with a torrent...

Don't actually take this bet.

> Decentralization entails degraded service

Not decentralization, but anonymous decentralization that involves indirect routing. Decentralization can actually offset that anonymity tax somewhat by the fact that you might have multiple sources that you can request data from in parallel.

Torrents disagree ;-)

Ironically, once I cut all vegetable and, in fact, all plant-based calories, out of my diet, I experience dramatic health and fitness benefits. I expect in this case the conventional wisdom is also exactly backwards and in fact transparency is more important than privacy.

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).

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.

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

Tor is faster than it used to be but this person is not wrong. 2-3x slower is a conservative estimate.

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.

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

No its not this slow . You can basically use to to web browse normally , even on heavy js pages.

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.

I use it regularly and don't find the latency that painful, though not negligible.

Not been slow compared to what? It's been slow for me any time I've tried it.

Compared to regular non-Tor web browsing. But impressions are subjective, I suppose.

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.

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.

Much faster than in the past, but still annoyingly slow by all means

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.

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