Tor bandwidth and TTFB used to be universally very bad for me, no matter what I was doing.
Some time around ~2 years ago, though, the particular use-case of using Tor to (anonymously) access public-Internet websites got a lot better—both in bandwidth and TTFB.
Access to Tor hidden services is still slow, though.
Which makes me wonder: is the Tor network itself unilaterally faster now, and it's actually just the particular Tor hidden services which are all coincidentally bandwidth-starved?
Comparing apples to apples, DuckDuckGo's hidden-service gateway (https://3g2upl4pq6kufc4m.onion/) still seems a lot worse-off than their clear-net website (https://duckduckgo.com/). And I would bet that they would scale their Tor gateway if they could. So maybe this is a limitation in how Tor handles routing to hidden services? Does a .onion have to route to one physical Tor node, rather than being capable of load-balancing among many?
I assume you mean exit traffic. Exit traffic is anything connecting to the open internet, whereas hidden services never leaves the Tor network.
For exit traffic I don't believe there is a metric for average user speed. But, I just ran a 3 speed tests using different circuits and was getting 500-800KB/s download speeds on average.
You can see that for a 5MiB file average download time is around 12 seconds [0], which is around 425KiB/s, the main problem with Tor is latency, downloading a 50KiB file takes around 1 to 2 seconds.
Try using it. Very slow. No matter where you are. I understand that some people have no choice other than to use it. so I stopped using it to leave whatever bandwidth there is in the exit nodes to them
It wouldn't be surprising if hidden services had a lot better performance. Running a guard node is a lot less risky than an exit, so there's probably a lot more capacity available for traffic staying inside the network.
That makes a lot more sense, regarding in-Tor bandwidth.
I've also had quite a few projects in which I'm trying to normalize Tor usage. My biggest one thus to date is a Tor-ified IoT network that uses your own resources instead of nebulous "cloud" providers.
Long story short, there's a lot of promise to a .onion address, given it acts like a telephone number. Change IPs? Who cares. You retain your "number" no matter where you move :) It's also a lot less scary when talking to people about this, and how Tor is awesome in many areas.
Yes, Tor hidden services are neat technology, using them for IoT is a clever idea. Authenticated, not really scannable and you avoid the typical issue of going out to someone pre-determined to get connectivity from the outside.
You can see that for a 5MiB file, hidden services perform 2-3 times slower, I would put most of the blame on data having to travel through more hops when using hidden services.
