[tor-relays] tor relay recommended upgrade procedure?

[Zenaan Harkness]

>> > HOWEVER: killing tor in 30 seconds seems to me a little harsh on all
>> > those anonymous connections that were previously going through my exit
>> > relay. Can those clients (if they need) pick up their connections
>> > after about 3 minutes? It appeared that all connections were
>> > completely gone when I finally got tor restarted
>
> As soon as your relay goes away the circuits will be cut, and the streams
> that clients had on those circuits will be cut too. Whether those clients
> will automatically reconnect those streams on new circuits depends on
> the application.

Is there some longer term sense in having a SOCKS protocol enhancement
to have the SOCKS/TOR server notify applications connecting through
it, that it intends to shutdown the relay/socks facility at X minutes
into the future?

In the tor relays itself, this would of course need some TOR control
channel or protocol where the 'relay reboot in X minutes' gets
propagated back to the end users of the channels through this relay/
exit node.

Although 'reconnect' is robust enough, prima facie, a little more
niceness for the users would be a good thing, I'd think.