[tor-talk] check.torproject.org

andrew at torproject.is andrew at torproject.is
Sat Nov 10 01:31:36 UTC 2012


On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 10:49:39AM -0500, drwho at virtadpt.net wrote 0.8K bytes in 28 lines about:
: Did something go pear-shaped with check.torproject.org?  I've not been
: able to get it to respond (through the TBB or otherwise) for the past
: day or so.

Yes. It comes and goes. Something yet to be discovered is causing the
check processes to consume all ram on the system, thereby causing out
of memory conditions, which crashes the backend processes that run check.

Check is a mix of python, https://svn.torproject.org/svn/check/trunk/,
haskell, https://gitweb.torproject.org/tordnsel.git, and apache. It was
a stopgap written four years ago to answer the question "tor or not".

It receives millions of requests per day, and clearly is not scaling
with Tor growth, and a single point of failure.

The real answer is check shouldn't exist anymore. There's no
reason to serve a webpage to answer "tor or not" in 2012. See
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/6546 for the current
thoughts on replacing check as it exists today.

-- 
Andrew
http://tpo.is/contact
pgp 0x6B4D6475


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