On the Recent Growth of the Tor Network

I'm one of those new relays & exit nodes. I joined in order to try and help with communications in and out of Iran.

I'm having to reevaluate that choice because my router is starting to choke on the sheer number of connections being held open. I checked the faq and googled around to see if TOR let me set a limit and find the apparent position of the TORproject is that I should upgrade my firmware or get a different router if that doesn't work.

I understand this position, but I hope that it is understood that it is one that likely limits the total number of TOR nodes and their longevity. It is not the sort of thing that will keep most people from running a node in the first place, but it is exactly the sort of thing that will make them quit.

I am running a recent 3rd party firmware on my Linksys WRT54G router. I could set up a linux or freebsd box as a more robust router at some point, but I'm guessing that scraping together that hardware getting it running and reconfiguring my network is going to take 5-10x as much time as it took me to port forward through my router and install tor on an existing box. Other people aren't even going to consider doing that much work.

In closing, thanks so much for the good work so far. Please consider things, like an open connection limit, that will make it easier for less committed or less knowledgeable users to help grow the TOR network with their existing equipment.

We are already seeing the impact of the Iranian regime's curtailing of communications. Its making it harder to coordinate large protests and this movement is only really a couple weeks old, it could take a year, or more, for the old regime to fall. The 1979 revolution actually played out over 12 months, and by most comparisions, that was pretty quick as revolutions go. The charts above are great, but it seems that it'll be really important to see even more growth, and sustain the levels for the long haul.