Load Balancing

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 9/22/07, Roger Dingledine <arma at mit.edu> wrote:
> Once upon a time, the value of "10 minutes" was actually more like 1
> minute. You see, the shorter it is, the fewer actions from the user are
> linkable with each other based on being in the same circuit. But Tor
> server operaters complained they were using 100% cpu because they were
> constantly handling new circuit creation requests. So we moved it back to
> 10 minutes -- bad for user security, but necessary to keep things working.
>
> If the user started churning through circuits at five times the current
> rate, we may end up forced to move the "10 minute" value back even farther
> to compensate, resulting in even more user connections becoming linkable.
>
Why does new circuit creation use up so much CPU?  Are you spawning a
new thread for each circuit, or something?  If so, maybe there's a way
to be more efficient instead?

I know, I know, I shouldn't complain if I'm not going to offer code.
So don't consider this a complaint, just a question.