notes from running a 24/7 tor client: outages, weird latency spikes and other things that make badges jump.
Every .onion connection is a small choreography of descriptors, introduction points and a rendezvous relay. Here is how the six-circuit handshake works, in plain language.
OnionBalance spreads onion services across backend instances, but it is not a DDoS shield. How frontend-backend balancing really works, where it failed in 2023-2024.
Onion services can be healthy yet unreachable. We explain how hidden service directories store descriptors, why republishing rules matter, and what overload does to reachability.
Tor rebuilds circuits every ten minutes but keeps the same guard relay for months. Research shows why switching guards early makes deanonymization more likely.
Circuit builds, relay congestion and quiet guard rotations explain most onion latency swings. Probes over weeks show why a hidden service feels instant at noon and crawls by midnight.
Tor Metrics charts look authoritative, but user numbers are modeled estimates rather than counts. What the curves really measure, their blind spots, and how not to over-read them.
Hosting bills, legal worry and burnout are thinning the ranks of volunteer Tor relay operators. Here is why they leave, and what a shrinking relay base means for network health.
Guard, middle or exit: a practical guide to running your first Tor relay, covering bandwidth costs, abuse handling and the legal basics every new operator should understand.
Brave ships Tor windows, Firefox blocks onion leaks behind a flag, and Chrome and Apple do nothing. What native .onion support really means for your safety.
The Onion-Location header promised to make .onion mirrors discoverable at a click. Years on, adoption among major clearnet sites remains stubbornly thin.
From the 2020 pandemic surge to election nights and wartime spikes, here is how the tor network absorbs sudden global demand - and why it sometimes slows to a crawl.
From the 2020 marketplace wars to proof-of-work defenses, we trace how DDoS attacks on onion services shaped Tor's architecture and why they remain so hard to stop.