[tor-relays] "Graceful" Restart of Tor-Relay ?

[Sebastian Hahn]

> On 30 Dec 2016, at 19:26, mistral.relay at 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