Security News > 2022 > May > Tor project upgrades network speed performance with new system
The Tor Project has published details about a newly introduced system called Congestion Control that promises to eliminate speed limits on the network.
Congestion Control "Will result in significant performance improvements in Tor, as well as increased utilization of our network capacity," say the maintainers of the project.
Tor is a volunteer-run overlay network consisting of thousands of relays that serve as bouncing points for encrypted user network traffic and exit nodes that are essentially the gateways to the public internet.
The Tor project has run simulations to compare versions 0.4.6 and 0.4.7, and the results are impressive across the board with smoother and improved browsing free of speed limitations and bottlenecks, without adding any burden on end-to-end latency.
"For this reason, we are holding back on releasing a Tor Browser Stable with congestion control until enough Exits have upgraded to make the experience more uniform. We hope this will happen by May 31st" - the Tor Project.
For the next major stable release, version 0.4.8, the Tor project plans to implement a traffic splitting mechanism that should improve network speeds even more.