Chapter 1 of 6 / nothing loads
Everything is painfully slow
It works, eventually. Every click takes twenty seconds and the whole thing feels like it is about to fall over. This is the normal condition of a hidden service rather than a fault, and there are only about three things that change it.
Why it is slow in the first place
A connection to a hidden service goes through several relays on your side and several more on the other side, all of them volunteer run and none of them chosen for speed. Nothing about that arrangement is going to feel like an ordinary website, and it is the price of the property that makes the address work at all.
On top of that the far end is usually under load, because a market is a busy site running on infrastructure that cannot be scaled the way a normal one would be.
What actually helps
| What people try | Does it help | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Rebuilding the circuit | Often | You may land on faster relays. Free to try |
| Using a different address from the set | Often | They are not equally loaded |
| Trying at a different time of day | Sometimes | Load has a daily shape like anything else |
| Closing other tabs on the same browser | A little | They share your circuits |
| Lowering the security setting | No | It does not affect speed and it costs you protection |
| Anything advertised as making Tor faster | No, and worse | That whole category is either useless or hostile |
The one that costs you money
The last row deserves its own warning. Software promising a faster Tor is one of the most reliable ways people end up with something on their machine that watches for addresses and swaps them between the copy and the paste. There is no such product, only that.
What slow does not mean
- Not a sign the market is failing. Load and health are unrelated here.
- Not a sign you are on a fake. Copies are usually the fast ones.
- Not something to fix by reloading. A reload asks for new circuits and joins the back of whatever queue exists.
- Not a reason to look for another address. That is the moment a helpful link appears, and the timing is deliberate.
The one thing worth doing while you wait
Check that the address you are on matches your saved copy, and if you do not have a saved copy, start one. The waiting is free, the check takes five seconds, and it answers the question you would otherwise ask later when a login form appears in front of you.
What the security setting actually changes
It changes what a page is allowed to run, not how fast it arrives. Turning it down does not speed anything up and it does hand more surface to whatever you are connected to, which is the wrong trade in both directions. If pages look broken at the higher setting, that is usually the setting doing its job rather than a fault.
The one real speed lever available to a reader is which relays they are using, and the only control over that is rebuilding the circuit. Everything else marketed as a speed improvement in this area is either doing nothing or doing something else.