My Tor bridge has been up and running for 40 days and it reports on average speeds at around 8 MiB/s while I'm on a 1 Gbps connection and while some bridges report up to 50 MiB/s: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/type:bridge running:true .

Why is this?

Meanwhile, a few theories:

1. My ISP limit the connection? Although Tor bridges are supposed to be obfuscated - that being the whole point of having them...

2. My bridge is geographically far away from the nearest nodes/relays?

3. My bridge hasn't been active for a sufficient amount of time for it to report higher speeds?

Tor is only as fast as the next hops and endpoint, meaning the slowest node is your max possible speed. It has nothing to do with YOUR connection speeds.

Example: if you have 1Gbps, but your next hop only does 20Mbps, and the next hop 10Mbps, and endpoint 1Gbps, the max speed you will get is still only 10Mbps because that is the slowest node in the connection chain.

In my experience (over a decade ago), it takes time for usage to build.

Thank you for your wisdom. 😊🙏