[tor-bugs] #28624 [Core Tor/Tor]: Should we remember dormant state on restart?

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#28624: Should we remember dormant state on restart?
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 Reporter:  arma          |          Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement   |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium        |      Milestone:  Tor: 0.4.0.x-final
Component:  Core Tor/Tor  |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal        |     Resolution:
 Keywords:                |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                |         Points:  2
 Reviewer:                |        Sponsor:
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Comment (by nickm):

 Replying to [comment:4 arma]:
 > So would that mean that by default, Tor never remembers its dormant
 state across restarts? (Or more precisely, never reacts to dormancy info
 in the state file on startup.)
 >
 > That would seem to not cover the "some linux distro includes a Tor
 client package by default" use case, right? It's more oriented towards
 specific Tor installs that know they want to be special?

 Right.  We could change the default later on, but I thought that for now,
 we're better off making this an off-by-default feature.

 On IRC, you said:

 > i am a bit suspicious also of the 'auto' choice being 'yes if my state
 file is from yesterday
 > because we do have a new bit of info from yesterday, and that new bit is
 "i just started tor"
 > and often, when i start tor, it's because now i plan to use it

 To clarify, the "auto" choice is "be active if I was active when I shut
 down, ''and'' I shut down recently".  Or if you prefer "be dormant if the
 state file was old, or if I was dormant in the old state file."

 I'm also concerned about whether this is the best approach, but I think
 that other choices won't work for the use cases we have.  If every startup
 makes tor active, then we won't actually have time to go dormant.

 I guess another possibility might be to remember the total number of hours
 Tor has been running without user activity, and let that build up
 cumulatively over invocations.  In this case, "auto" might mean simply
 "remember if we were active", and we might additionally track in our state
 file the cumulative number of minutes that Tor has run without seeing user
 activity.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/28624#comment:5>
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