Memory usage on relays

[John Brooks]

This topic has been addressed before, but then the answer was often to
use/wait for 0.2.1.x or switch to another allocator. I'm thinking
there must be a real solution to this somewhere.

I run a reasonably fast (500KB/s) node with Guard+Fast+Stable, so it's
a popular destination. It runs at bandwidth capacity at all times. The
only problem with this is the massive memory usage that results; at
the moment, Tor has 748MB res usage, with almost 7 days of uptime.
Generally it escalates at a rate of 100-200MB per day after a restart,
and tops out around this number. My understanding is that most of that
memory usage is related to the open connections; socket buffers, SSL
buffers, etc. At the moment (according to /proc/x/fd), Tor has 5,364
open connections.

Short of limiting available FDs, which might harm the performance of
the node, what can I do to lower memory usage? It's currently running
the Debian testing build, 0.2.1.20-2, and openssl 0.9.8g-15+lenny6.
I'm not against doing custom builds of Tor or OpenSSL if it will help.
I did have similar problems on my previous machine running Gentoo,
where I had tried different the different allocator configurations,
and that had little or no effect.

Somebody else has to have come across this problem and some sort of
solution; I can't have Tor taking up half the available memory on my
system. Suggestions would be very appreciated.

Thanks,

  - John Brooks
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