[tor-bugs] #6783 [Tor Directory Authority]: should not serve old v2 statuses

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#6783: should not serve old v2 statuses
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 Reporter:  weasel                   |          Owner:                  
     Type:  defect                   |         Status:  new             
 Priority:  major                    |      Milestone:                  
Component:  Tor Directory Authority  |        Version:  Tor: 0.2.3.20-rc
 Keywords:                           |         Parent:                  
   Points:                           |   Actualpoints:                  
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 when a v2 directory goes away, other tor authorities keep serving their
 cached copy of the v2 status document of that directory.

 If that status directory is old this will result in clients (clients or
 other relays?) downloading the status document, realizing it's to old, and
 trying to download it again.  ad inf.

 While tor26 was serving dizum's two-day old status document it was
 completely swamped.  it had thousands of directory requests open at a
 time, they were consuming all the bandwidth and memory and it didn't even
 get to properly participate in consensus building.

 Removing dizum's old status document from the cache and restarting tor26
 made it happy.  It now says 404 and clients don't come back (or if they
 do, at least it's a cheap 404 and not "here's 100k you'll throw away
 immediately, have it as often as you want".

 I think we should stop serving expired status documents.

 Or maybe we should stop serving them entirely.  If we still need them
 between authorities, let's move them to a different URL.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6783>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
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