The whole thing was slow, not the site

Pages take forever. Some finish and some do not. It feels like the service is struggling and the natural conclusion is that something is wrong with it.

Tor goes through periods where everything is slow at once. Sustained flooding aimed at somebody else, a surge in usage, a large relay disappearing, a client bug rolling out across many machines. The cause varies and the effect is a network that is worse for everybody on the same day.

A thirty second test

Load two or three other onion services that have nothing to do with this one. If they are all equally slow, the condition is not local to your destination and the question is answered.

Keep a couple of unrelated onion addresses to hand purely for this purpose. Anything stable will do. It is the cheapest diagnostic available in the whole subject and almost nobody bothers to prepare it in advance, which means it is never available at the moment it would help.

Why slowness gets personalised

Because you are only looking at one thing. The reader has one destination in mind, so the slowness attaches to that destination. It never occurs to most people to check whether the slowness is general, because the slowness feels specific.

The same reasoning error runs in the other direction and is worth naming. A site that loads fine right now proves nothing about the network being healthy either. One sample of one thing is one sample of one thing.

What not to do while waiting

• Do not lower browser security settings. It changes nothing about network conditions and costs you protection permanently.
• Do not reinstall anything. The problem is not on your machine.
• Do not request new circuits repeatedly. Building paths is exactly the operation that is slow right now.
• Do not start any transaction. Half completed actions during network trouble are how duplicates get created.

What follows from getting it right

The main gain is that you stop doing damage while waiting. Most of the harm on a slow evening is self inflicted, and it comes from a reader trying increasingly drastic remedies for a condition that no remedy of theirs can touch.

The second gain is that you stop broadcasting a false report. Slow evenings produce a great many confident public claims that a particular market is failing, and those claims are made by people who never checked whether anything else was slow.

Why nobody can tell you how long it lasts

There is no schedule and no announcement. A network made of volunteer relays with no central operator does not have a maintenance window, and the conditions that cause a slow spell are not the sort of thing anybody publishes in advance.

Some of these clear in an hour. Some have gone on for weeks, with the network usable but tiring throughout. Anybody offering you a duration is guessing, and the honest position is that it will end when it ends.

The practical consequence is about planning rather than patience. Do not leave anything with a deadline attached until the last moment, because the network occasionally decides that the last moment is a bad time.

• Back to the cases the network caused
• When the delay was deliberate
• Every case in one table