Why Tor is slow and what we're going to do about it

arma — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 03:33:01 -0700

I've just finished writing up an explanation of all the various reasons why the Tor network is slow, and what we can do about each. Part of it comes down to design flaws; some of it is that a handful of users are overloading the network; and there's also simply not enough capacity to go around.

Specifically, we've identified six categories of problems to address, and laid out some steps to resolve each of them.

You can read the pdf here:
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/tor/trunk/doc/roadmaps/2009-03-11-performance.pdf

Andrew has also put together a real live press release to go with it.

Now all that remains is to do everything. So if you want to help, or especially if you know any organizations that can help with funding, please help us make this happen!

[Edit, 19 August 2009: you can watch the HAR2009 video explaining our key performance plans, if you aren't a fan of 25-page pdfs.]

Our three-year development roadmap is published

phobos — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:11:53 -0800

We've published our three-year development roadmap. There are two main goals in publishing this document: first to be more transparent in what we're doing; and second to ask for help in improving everything related to Tor.

While we don't expect everyone will read through the roadmap start to finish, the Table of Contents provides a quick overview of the high-level goals. Each high-level goal is fairly independent of another, so you can simply read about the goals that interest you.

And for the first time ever, we've created a press release. This is our attempt to become more press friendly and provide a way for the media to start a conversation with us.

We welcome your comments and feedback!