Servers, relays and wildcards

[curiosityseeker]

I'm aware that similar issues were opened before - but there are still open questions, IMO.

The wiki says:

A wildcard (*) can be used instead of a server name in order to apply a set of relays to all servers. Only use this if you have server_names defined, with a small set of servers that don't overlap with relays.

On the other hand that site contains the following statements:

A wildcard can also be used as a relay (via=["*"]). In that case, the proxy will automatically choose the relays, selecting them by trying to avoid relays and servers to be on the same network.

... and:

When using wildcards, dnscrypt-proxy tries to choose relays so that they are not on the same network as the servers they relay to.

English is not my native language so I might not be able to fully get it. But aren't above statements a bit inconsistent?

• The first one says that wildcards for server names should only be used for a small set of server_names that don't overlap with relays.
• The second one says that when using a wildcard for relays dnscrypt-proxy takes care that servers and relays don't overlap.
• The third one finally says that when using wildcards (apparently both for servers and relays) dnscrypt-proxy tries to choose servers and relays that don't overlap.

Don't make the second an third statements the first one void? And isn't the consequence from the third statement that

routes = [ { server_name='*', via=['*'] } ]

should actually not be problem?

I realize that there is a forth statement:

However, this is very likely to be suboptimal from a performance and privacy perspective. A manual selection is always preferred.

Why is that? If it comes to performance I understand that after booting my system it takes longer to test all servers compared to testing a limited set of server_names. But apart from this - are there other performance considerations? Load balancing of relays is not done by dnscrypt-proxy, AFAIK, so it's probably difficult to manually select the most performant ones.

And why is this approach suboptimal from a privacy perspective? Is the remark that "dnscrypt-proxy tries to choose relays so that they are not on the same network as the servers" a hint that this might not be reliable?