On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 06:09:24PM +0200, Markus Ottela via tor-talk wrote: > I've been experiencing weird behavior with Tor + Stem + Flask Onion Services > dying randomly once every 1..5 days. I wrote a script that's making > connections to a test an Onion Service to see when exactly the servers > disappear -- and creating logs based on that. The system spins up new > requests client instance for each connection, so those might be what's > appearing on the graph. I'm just puzzled why they'd appear as different > users, given that the public IP has remained static. (Also the script > automatically spins up new Onion Service once it's been down for an hour, so > that could explain the spikes.) > > Again I'm not sure that's what this is about, but both the start time, and > the most recent major downtime spikes match. I've killed testing, let's see > if it returns to normal; I think there's enough data to open a ticket about > my issue anyway.
That's an interesting hypothesis. The user count estimate does not use IP addresses; rather it counts directory requests. See: https://gitweb.torproject.org/metrics-web.git/tree/src/main/resources/doc/users-q-and-a.txt?id=6c2679ec1797976e171a68bbd3d7442a34f0a5d1 > Q: How is it even possible to count users in an anonymity network? > A: We actually don't count users, but we count requests to the > directories that clients make periodically to update their list of > relays and estimate user numbers indirectly from there. > Q: What if a user runs tor on a laptop and changes their IP address a > few times per day? Don't you overcount that user? > A: No, because that user updates their list of relays as often as a > user that doesn't change IP address over the day. In your experiments, were you starting tor with an empty DataDirectory and a cold directory cache each time (e.g., in a freshly initialized container), or were you reusing the same DataDirectory? The former I would expect to have an effect on estimated users; the latter not. -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk