[tor-relays] A bit more evidence on circuit creation storms

David Carlson david.carlson.417 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 30 20:06:45 UTC 2013


On 8/29/2013 11:09 PM, Andreas Krey wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Aug 2013 19:35:37 +0000, Gordon Morehouse wrote:
> ...
>> Aug 29 18:19:14.000 [notice] Your network connection speed appears to
>> have changed. Resetting timeout to 60s after 18 timeouts and 172
>> buildtimes.
> Random data point: I had these yesterday on a VPS-based relay.
>
>> My main question:  How do circuit creation requests on one's Tor relay
>> cause load on one's network infrastructure?  Is it DNS requests?  Is
>> it TCP connection state entries?  It's not bandwidth, we observed that
>> above, and my router can handle far faster pipes than the one it's on
>> currently.  The DNS failing is a sign that the router is under severe
>> stress.
> Possibly your uplink is full (supposing you're on some DSL), and is
> starting to build up ping time; then DNS requests to the outside can
> start to timeout.
>
> Andreas
>
>

Over roughly the same time frame I received an incredibly high number of
spam e-mails in one e-mail account that normally gets 20 or so a day on
quiet days.  Perhaps this is another example of mal-ware in action.

David C


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