troll-patrol-artifact

Troll Patrol Artifact

This repo contains scripts for reproducing the results in our paper.

Reproducing our results

Dependencies:

• bash
• docker
• git

To reproduce our results:

1. git clone -b artifact https://git-crysp.uwaterloo.ca/vvecna/lox-troll-patrol-extension
2. cd lox-troll-patrol-extension
3. ./run.sh [-n NUM_PERFORMANCE_CORES] [-N PERFORMANCE_CORE_RANGE] or ./run-fast.sh [-n NUM_PERFORMANCE_CORES] [-N PERFORMANCE_CORE_RANGE]

The ./run.sh script takes a long time and requires a few GB of free space. The reason is that it downloads and processes all extra-info records for all bridges from 2020-07 to 2021-04 from the Tor Project's CollecTor service. This is about 4 million files, and it takes a long time to process them all. (These files are downloaded in compressed archives; the total download size for them is under 750 MB.)

The ./run-fast.sh script instead starts with a 6.7 MB archive (87 MB uncompressed) containing only the information we need. This is much faster and requires much less disk space. It yields identical results; however, it requires trusting that the pre-processed data was extracted correctly.

See the "Time to Run" section below to estimate how long either option will take. The choice between the two scripts only determines whether ./scripts/belarus.sh or ./scripts/belarus.sh --fast will be run. The other steps are pretty quick. If you specify -n NUM_PERFORMANCE_CORES, then the Lox benchmarking step (./scripts/generate-lox-results.sh) will only use the first NUM_PERFORMANCE_CORES threads. This may take a bit longer but should ensure that the results are computed fairly. You can also specify -N PERFORMANCE_CORE_RANGE to use only specific threads (e.g., -N 1-2,4-5), instead of 0 through NUM_PERFORMANCE_CORES-1. If you use the -N option, please also use the -n option to specify how many threads are available in the specified set.

Results

The results are all output to the top-level directory of the project. After running either ./run.sh or ./run-fast.sh:

• The results from Section 3 can be found in the section-3-results file.
• Table 4 (found in Appendix A of the paper) can be found in appendix-a-results.pdf
• Tables 2 and 3 (from Section 6) can be found in table-2-results.pdf and table-3-results.pdf.
• Table 5 (in Appendix B) can be found in appendix-b-results.pdf.

Recovering from Errors

Hopefully the script will just run everything without issue. If there is an issue at a step, try deleting the files/directories related to that step, stopping and removing any docker containers related to that step, and running the above script again. The script will not attempt to re-run steps that have files. If a step worked, just leave its files there, and you shouldn't have to redo that step.

If you want to run the commands for individual steps, you can do that. From the top-level directory, run:

• ./scripts/setup.sh to clone dependencies and build the docker images
• ./scripts/belarus.sh to produce the results from Section 3 and Appendix A starting with all 20 GB of data from the Tor Project (or ./scripts/belarus.sh --fast to start with some pre-processed data)
• ./scripts/generate-lox-results.sh [-n NUM_EFFICIENT_CPUS] to run the Lox benchmarking code to get the results from Section 6 and Appendix B (see the next step for producing the actual tables); specify NUM_PERFORMANCE_CORES to only use the first NUM_PERFORMANCE_CORES threads
• ./scripts/process-lox-results.sh to process the Lox benchmarking results previously produced by ./scripts/generate-lox-results.sh and generate the tables in Section 6 and Appendix B

Time to Run

On my laptop (13th Gen Intel Core i7-1360P; 16 threads; 4 performance cores, up to 5 GHz):

• ./scripts/setup.sh: 10m 35s
• ./scripts/belarus.sh: 9h 15m 16s
• ./scripts/belarus.sh --fast: 1m 4s
• ./scripts/generate-lox-results.sh -n 4: 18m 39s
• ./scripts/process-lox-results.sh: 18s

On the device used for the paper (Intel Xeon Platinum 8380; 80 threads; 40 cores @ 2.30 GHz, up to 3.40 GHz):

• ./scripts/setup.sh: 6m 47s
• ./scripts/belarus.sh: 7h 57m 10s
• ./scripts/belarus.sh --fast: 1m 0s
• ./scripts/generate-lox-results.sh: 5m 56s
• ./scripts/process-lox-results.sh: 17s