Remailer stats

[Bruce Baugh]

The following is the result of my own experiments, performed when a) I
started noticing that my remailing times didn't seem to match the ping lists
available and b) another local guy posted a format that seemed useful, so I
swiped it.

I mailed through each of the remailers listed below ten times over the
course of eight days (10 Jan 96 to 18 Jan 96) - posts went out spread across
all hours of the day and night, to compensate for congestion at high-traffic
times. (Insomnia's value as a research aid, coming soon to a major
scientific journal.) Each post went through the remailer, to a nym server,
back through the remailer, and then to me. The trip time is the interval
from the end of a posting session with Eudora and PPP connection to Teleport
to the arrival of a message in my mailbox at Teleport. Times are given in
hours and minutes. "Failure" means that I hadn't gotten a reply back within
four days of posting it.

I anticipate doing this on a monthly basis, and would be delighted to hear
from anyone else doing the same. Joel McNamara has raised the possibility of
a net resource that would feed back the data for whatever region is closet
to the inquirer, which sounds seriously cool to me.

REMAILER PERFORMANCE, MID-JANUARY

FAILURES    REMAILER                        AVG     MIN     MAX     NOTES

 0          hroller at c2.org                  00:05   00:02   00:18
 0          homer at rahul.net                 00:06   00:03   00:14
 0          hfinny at shell.portal.com         00:08   00:02   00:38
 0          remailer at armadillo.com          00:09   00:06   00:12
 0          hal at alumni.caltech.edu          00:09   00:02   00:24
 0          remailer at utopia.hacktic.nl      00:19   00:03   01:20
 0          mixmaster at vishnu.alias.net      00:56   00:23   02:38
 0          remailer at valhalla.phoenix.net   01:35   00:20   05:49
 0          mixmaster at remail.obscura.com    02:36   00:23   06:55
 0          remailer at bi-node.zerberus.de    07:43   00:15   19:54

 1          remailer at replay.com             00:31   00:13   01:14

 2          remail at c2.org                   00:52   00:14   03:00

 8          remailer at extropia.wimsey.com    01:46   01:19   02:13   [1]
 8          mix at remail.gondolin.org         11:17   03:58   18:36

10          amnesia at chardos.connix.com      ?       ?       ?

[1] On the 19th or 20th, extropia.wimsey.com suddenly cleared backlog, and
all my messages did go through. So I'll see how it does in February; looks
like they had a week-long weirdness of some kind.

Comments welcome.

Bruce Baugh
bruceab at teleport.com
http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab