[tor-talk] Tor hibernation: Unlinking IP changes from TCP state

[grarpamp]

It seems that at any given time and for various purposes Tor has
some TCP connections open to various places. Now if you rip
your IP out from under that with DHCP, etc... Tor, and even the
TCP stack itself, is going to in some cases attempt retransmits
and things when the new IP comes up. There will be TCP state,
sequence numbers, etc following you around till the stale connections
eventually die off. There certainly isn't any use to that behavior.

Seems to me that Tor should have a controller command that
tells Tor to close down all connections, another to confirm things
are closed (instead of waiting for possible indefinite return on the
first), and then hibernate till awakened by a complimentary command.

Users could wrap these around DHCP or whatever change mechanism
they have.

Of course none of this worthwhile if killing and restarting Tor is of no
real loss to Tor performance, such as cached Tor data which will
eventually be reobtaint from the network.