Anyone doing dark web collection knows the throughput problem: a single Tor circuit caps out low, and when you need to archive a leak dump, a marketplace mirror, or a few hundred MB off a hidden service before it rotates or disappears, sequential pulls over one circuit are painful.

I built a small Python tool for this, OnionAccelerator, and figured I'd share it here in case it's useful to others doing the same kind of work and because I'd like a second set of eyes on the approach.

What it does: it fans downloads out across multiple SOCKS5 proxies (Tor instances), in three modes:

• multi — pulls a list of URLs in parallel, one worker per circuit
• partial — splits a single file into byte-range chunks, fetches each chunk over a different circuit, then merges.
• speedtest — benchmarks each proxy port so you can drop dead/slow circuits before a run

You can back it with locally Dockerised Tor instances (there's a one-liner in the README that spins up ~20) or an external SOCKS5 list. It also does User-Agent rotation, inline retries, per-host output paths so same-named files don't clobber each other, and per-job logging.

Caveats I'm aware of, and would rather name than hide: it leans on running multiple circuits, so mind the load and your own OPSEC around whatever proxies you route through. It's meant for collection you're authorised to do, not for hammering anything. The code started as a personal utility, so it's rough in places.

Repo

PRs, issues, and "you're doing X wrong" all welcome. Mostly curious whether the byte-range-across-circuits approach lines up with how others handle bulk retrieval over Tor, or if people are solving it differently.