Strange, right after the event the reported number of "circuits" went up hugely --have never seen this: Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 4 days 0:00 hours, with 5359 circuits open. . . Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 4 days 6:00 hours, with 17524 circuits open. . . But the line-count from "GETINFO orconn-status" is around 4100. Performed a SIGUSR1 dump and see the 17k number here too, but both the "Conn" and "Channel" lists are around 4k: ========== Dumping stats: $ egrep '\] Conn [0-9]+ is ' logfile | wc -l 4204 Dumping statistics about 4193 channels: 4193 are active, and 0 are done and waiting for cleanup $ fgrep '] Channel ' logfile | wc -l 4194 --------------- Dumping memory information: In buffers for 4208 connections: 59566 used/565248 allocated For 4193 OR connections: 1002 used/458752 allocated In 7482 live descriptors: 10293977 bytes. In 14832 old descriptors: 20384003 bytes. 0 cells allocated on 17017 circuits. 2 cells leaked. $ fgrep '] OR ' logfile | wc -l 11132 ========== Report is confusing, what is a "Conn?" a "Channel?" a "circuit?". The Tor specification does not discuss this. Nothing from Google search.