nexusb2l7fmqnefwphyy7m5zjhlkytlbo7qbb5lu5dlczr3azgii2gyd.onionnexusma2iqgauqqvjcgds4ckv5xbf272tkfagq4epojjhsgleqpwxiqd.onionnexusabcd6tyfhdwilyitaqiri6tisj2v2hueyjuj6qkvd6azvi5tuqd.onionRun the check before you sign in. Open these in Tor Browser only. When the login screen loads, compare the onion printed on the page against your address bar, reading from the end. If they differ, close the tab.
A connection to an onion service crosses roughly six relays before a single byte comes back. Slowness is built into the design, and knowing the normal range keeps you from chasing a problem that is not there.
Why it is slow by design
An ordinary site is you, maybe a proxy, and the server. An onion service is your three hop circuit to a meeting point plus the service three hop circuit to the same meeting point. Every hop adds its own latency and the slowest relay in the chain sets the pace for everyone. There is no cache and no shortcut.
The normal range
| Load type | Typical wait | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Cold first load | 8 to 45 seconds | Includes descriptor lookup and building both halves of the rendezvous. |
| Warm load, same session | 1 to 6 seconds | The circuit already exists and gets reused. |
| Cold load under heavy traffic | 45 to 120 seconds | Still healthy, just queued behind everyone else. |
| Anything over two minutes | Outside normal | Take a fresh circuit or move to another mirror. |
The single biggest lever
Circuit reuse. The first page of a session pays for the whole setup and every page after it rides the same circuit. Opening the market, doing everything you came for, and leaving is much faster overall than opening it four times across an evening. Closing the browser discards the circuit and you pay the cold cost again.
What does not help
- Reloading during the wait. It abandons progress and starts the same expensive setup from scratch.
- Turning the security level down. The wait is network time, not rendering time, so nothing changes.
- Switching mirrors after ten seconds. You have not waited long enough to know the first one was slow.
How to read the result
Healthy. This is what a working connection to a busy onion service feels like.
Busy but fine. Once you are in, stay in and do everything in one session.
Take a new circuit for the site. If a second attempt is just as slow, another mirror will be quicker.
Other latency signals
Text lands fast, images crawl
Why listing photos on a Nexus mirror lag well behind the page text, what that says about your circuit, and when to stop waiting.
LatencyThe session freezes partway and then resumes
Pauses in the middle of a working Nexus session usually mean a relay dropped and the circuit is being rebuilt. Why waiting beats reloading.
LatencyUploads and large pages stall out
When image uploads to a Nexus mirror stall at a percentage or big pages stop halfway, the circuit has run out of usable bandwidth.
Procedures that apply here
How to take an honest reading of a mirror
A repeatable way to measure whether a Nexus mirror is slow, broken or fine, without tooling and without fooling yourself.
FixRequesting a new circuit, and when it actually helps
The single most useful control in Tor Browser for onion problems, what it does, what it costs and which symptoms it fixes.
MethodChoosing which of the three mirrors to use
The three Nexus addresses reach the same market. How to pick between them sensibly and why the fastest one today may not be tomorrow.