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Dear All Experts out there! I am doing some researches about the Tor Network, and want to frequently download the consensus data from the Directory Authority Servers (let say 5 minutes each). Thanks to Roya, I know exactly how many Directory authority servers there are in the network, and their IPs. Today, I did read some research papers, there were some experts created tools to get the consensus data from those servers. But it seems to be quite long time ago, out of date, and cannot be used anymore. I would be very grateful if anyone could tell me how or which tool should I use to get the consensus data from those Directory authority servers. Thank you so much for reading my question.

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    The Directory Authorities come to a new consensus once per hour. There is no point in downloading the consensus more often than that.
    – Jobiwan
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 9:47
  • Thank you so much for pointing out this feature. So could I please ask you this question that "why in this page, they write that Approximate Page Generation Time (Seconds): 0.3426? Does it mean that the page get updated every 0.3426s"? torstatus.blutmagie.de I am looking forward to receiving your advice.
    – 2523fewqf23f
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 13:37
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    That means that it took the web server 0.3462 seconds to build the web page. (Querying the database + constructing the HTML)
    – Jobiwan
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 14:57

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Near the top of this page: Consensus Health, in the Signatures section, you will find a 'consensus' (and 'vote') link for each Directory Authority.
These link directly to http://ip.of.the.relay:dirport/tor/status-vote/current/consensus.

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  • Thank you so much Jobiwan for your prompt Answer, I just had a brief glance at your links; and, I think it's somehow what I am really looking for. Best regards!
    – 2523fewqf23f
    Commented Jan 5, 2015 at 13:34
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You can easily fetch the consensus with...

For an example of a script that compares a couple authorities see...

That said, please don't hit the authorities every five minutes! Consensuses are generated hourly, so polling more frequently than that just adds load.

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  • Dear Damian! Thank you so much for the details, your advice is really helpful. It's just on time, when I start learning python yesterday ^^!
    – 2523fewqf23f
    Commented Jan 8, 2015 at 4:05
  • Dear @Damian, I am really grateful for your help in the previous question. Today, I have another question here (link) about Client's Frequency of downloading consensus from Directory Servers, and got an answer interpreted from the Tor's Source Code that Client attempts to download the document every 60 seconds. So is that the correct interpretation? If it was, does doing like that add more load to the Directory Servers?
    – 2523fewqf23f
    Commented Jan 28, 2015 at 10:18
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    Correction, the answer you were given there was "Every minute it is checked if the consensus document is too old. If it is older than the current time a new one will be fetched.". The consensus has a duration that it's valid so tor only fetches new descriptor data if what it's already received has expired.
    – Damian
    Commented Jan 29, 2015 at 16:44
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The votes themselves are also hosted at https://collector.torproject.org/archive/relay-descriptors/votes/ where they can be downloaded directly.

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