There’s a fundamental trade-off between performance and privacy for onion routing. Much of the slowness you’re experiencing is likely network latency, and no software optimization will improve that.

I believe that the slowness is a matter of the amount nodes in the tor network, not something that can be fixed solely by code changes.

No one is claiming the new version is faster, only that it is safer.

With 3 proxies traffic circles around the planet 2 times, which takes light 1/4 second to travel. Response does it again, so 1/2 second in total. Light is slow.

I think this shows a misunderstanding of the purpose of TOR. It’s for privacy, not optimal latency for your video stream.

You meant Tor network, right? Sadly, making very fast anonymous overlay networks is extremely difficult. You either make it fast or don't sacrifice anonymity. I personally noticed that Tor network has significantly improved and is way faster since a few years. It's also not recommended to exit and if you religiously stay over onions, you increase your anonymity.

> My biggest gripe with the Tor project is that it is so slow.

It’s not supposed to be a primary browsing outlet nor a replacement for a VPN. It’s for specific use cases that need high protection. The tradeoff between speed and privacy for someone whistleblowing to a journalist, as an example, is completely reasonable.

Having too much bandwidth available to each participant would incentivize too much abuse. In my past experience, a Tor associated IP was already highly correlated with abuse (users trying to evade bans, create alternate accounts to break rules, and then of course the actual attacks on security).

I had that problem too, very slow on network requests, just change the setting "num_relays_proxied" from 3 to 1 to make it blazingly fast.

> And I am also not entirely convinced that Rust is really better than C.

Well it's certainly not worse than c, and it's hard to argue it's as bad, so...

> I don't think merely moving to Rust makes Tor faster either.

It would be crazy to think switching languages would make a network protocol faster without some evidence of this.

Hey, if you want a fast anonymity netowrk, there are commercial providers. Companies doing research on thier competition use these to hide thier true idents from targets. They are not cheap (not free but cheaper than AWS imho) but have much greater functionality than tor.

https://voodootomato.medium.com/managed-attribution-the-key-...

https://www.authentic8.com/blog/non-attribution-misattributi...

I agree it probably won't make it faster. But there is absolutely no comparison when it comes to safety/stability. I've written a ton of C code, and it's just not even close. Rust really outshines C and C++ in this regard, and by a very large margin too.