Exceeding connection limit

[phobos at rootme.org]

On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 11:44:13PM +0100, slush at centrum.cz wrote 2.4K bytes in 54 lines about:
: is there any easy way, how to limit connections for Tor? Thousands of
: connections often breaks my lowcost ADSL router at home and I have to
: restart it.

This is a FAQ answer,
https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/TorFAQ#CablemodemCrashes

: I think it should be similar option like Bandwidth rate. Or is there any
: reason, why there must be thousands of connection from point of Tor network
: design?

In the manual page, there is:
ConnLimit NUM
 The minimum number of file descriptors that must be available to the
Tor process before it will start. Tor will ask the OS for as many file
descriptors as the OS will allow (you can find this by "ulimit -H -n").
If this number is less than ConnLimit, then Tor will refuse to start. 
 You probably don't need to adjust this. It has no effect on Windows
since that platform lacks getrlimit(). (Default: 1000)

This may or may not work to fix the problems with a poorly designed ADSL
router.  

As for the design questions, I'll let someone else answer that as I
can't find the details as to why right now.

-- 
Andrew