TOR hideously slow
 

Greetings,

just having installed TOR I am very happy about the anonymizing capabilities. Unfortunately, everything I do is unbearably slow - setting up a connection takes up to 5 seconds, requesting data another 5, and then there is the max speed of about 5 KBps, averaging at about 500bps. IMHO a little too slow even for a small, privately run network...

Any tweaks that could be made? Do I need to forward any connections through my router? And why does it take so long to connect?

Setup is a single PC behind a router/firewall/modem at a 4000Kbit ADSL line, running Debian Unstable @ 2.6.22-3-686 and Tor v0.1.2.19 through privoxy 3.0.8.

Thanks in advance!
D

Tor is slow for a number of reasons. First because it is encrypted and your pc takes slightly longer to decrypt. Second, not enough people run onion routers. Everyone wants the benefit that tor offers but without contributing back. This means there are not enough onion routers to offer the performance people would like. Third, your traffic has to travel across several hops. This is part of the tor's magic. It makes it harder to track your traffic. If you wanted to tweak this you could run one or more onion routers and contribute back. You could even run your own private onion routers and only forward your own network traffic, but then that defeats the purpose of staying anonymous.

Setting up a relay would have been my next action, but 500bps is not just 'slow'. Researching about TOR I never read about such low values. But well, seems I'll just have to wait for more servers to appear. Thanks for responding!