Have you used Tor recently? I don't find it to be very slow. It's obviously not Gigabit but for just reading web pages it is more than enough. See https://metrics.torproject.org/torperf.png?start=2012-01-01&... - and that recent spike in latency only exists because of some DDos attack (I think).
It's about the same it's always been from roughly 2015. I've used it maybe 6 months ago to get around a YouTube geoblock?
What this graph doesn't really unveil but is so crucially important is that webpages have gotten a lot heavier over the years. In the past, you could visit most websites at a half-decent speed with a regular landline connection. Nowadays you need to download several megabytes of content before you can even load a page in properly.
Re:The FBI Identified a Tor User
by HackerNCoder on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @02:05PM
(#34417118)
> in no small part because running the server space needed usually incurs significant legal risks since congrats, you've now become a target for law enforcement to bust your door down and ask why an IP you own a machine on is being used to upload CP to the clearnet - few people want to deal with this scenario for blatantly obvious reasons
It only does if you set it up as an exit node.
It has basically all the drawbacks a VPN has (most sites will distrust you on recaptcha, speed bumps, sometimes a connection gets timed out or dropped) whilst having a shitton of latency on top of that because y'know, it's free. There's always been more people willing to use TOR than the server space needed to prevent overburdening the network (in no small part because running the server space needed usually incurs significant legal risks since congrats, you've now become a target for law enforcement to bust your door down and ask why an IP you own a machine on is being used to upload CP to the clearnet - few people want to deal with this scenario for blatantly obvious reasons).
This isn't really something you can fix, it's just kind of an inherent issue with the protocol.
[0]: https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY