[tor-talk] Hidden Services - reliably resolving/using onions, CPU

[Robert Ransom]

On 9/6/12, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Overall, it seems Tor acts unreliably when loaded down with hidden
> service requests. Whereas with TCP over a loaded internet or CPU,
> you normally get connections and data, just more slowly. This
> behavior with Tor could very easily impact chatty mesh services
> that people might want to deploy on onions. Ideas?

Patient: ‘Doctor, it hurts when I do this.’
Doctor: ‘Don't do that then.’

Tor's hidden service protocol requires that the client build many
auxiliary circuits in order to establish each rendezvous circuit (and
a client must open a separate rendezvous circuit with each hidden
service that it connects to).  A client connection attempt which does
not succeed quickly also causes the service to build many wasted
circuits.  Any system in which each user operates a Tor hidden service
and attempts to connect to many other users *will* put excessive load
on the network in several ways, in addition to wasting users' CPU time
and making the Tor instances involved generally flake out.


Robert Ransom