circuits, streams, and their attachment

[Jon McLachlan]

Hey Everyone,

  Does anyone know why automatic attaching of streams to circuits may 
fail, aside from the "stale" timeout that is currently on TorCircuits, 
defaulted at 10 min?  I am using the Tor Controller to construct custom 
private circuit (with purpose=general, from posted TorDescriptors with 
their purpose=controller).  Those purpose's settings seemed to be the 
only way to get the descriptors and circuitExtention calls to work 
nicely together, AND still achieve automatic stream attachment.  Maybe 
Tor fails to attached streams to circuit if the circuit appears to be 
overused?

  Also, is there any risk in setting the remote connection host's IP to 
be 0.0.0.1 in the socks4a headers from the application to the Tor 
SocksPort?  This way, it forces Tor to do a DNS lookup on the hostname 
to grab its IP?  Maybe this "hack" is connected with the previous problem?

  I've noticed Tor gives a cute warning msg if the IP is valid but the 
hostname is absent in the socks4a handshake.  :)

  Are there any statistics (or guestimates? :) ) on how long it should 
take Tor to extend a circuit by one more additional hop, in a privately 
controlled environment, ie, not wild?  How about how long for a posted 
Tor Descriptor (posted from the control port) to become operational?

  Many thanks for any help or comments.

Best Regards,
~Jon