On 30 Dec 2016, at 19:26, mistral.relay@posteo.net wrote:
Hello all, a newbie question:
assuming that I want to shut down and restart a running tor-relay (for whatever reason; e.g. a linux reboot is required) - is it fine to just shut down the relay or is there a nicer, more tor-user friendly way so circuits don't drop for them unexpectedly?
I was thinking about a command to tell tor to complete whatever is ongoing, but to not accept any new circuits or other requests and then stop working. Would setting the BandwidthBurst to 0 followed by a tor-reload do this over some time (checking with e.g. arm what is still ongoing)?
Many thanks!
Tor has this functionality built-in, the timeout is configurable (30 seconds by default). Setting too long a timeout is bad if you're a guard, because the longer you wait to restart the more clients will rotate away from you while you're down - just restarting without any timeout at all is rude for anyone currently having an active circuit, of course.
In short: The default is a sensible compromise, if you run a no-guard relay you can increase the timeout massively to be "nicer" to people with long-running connections, if you're a guard you probably shouldn't.
Cheers Sebastian