[tor-bugs] #29744 [Core Tor/Tor]: Streams sometimes stall for up to 1 hour without making any progress

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#29744: Streams sometimes stall for up to 1 hour without making any progress
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     Reporter:  karsten       |      Owner:  (none)
         Type:  defect        |     Status:  new
     Priority:  Medium        |  Milestone:
    Component:  Core Tor/Tor  |    Version:  Tor: 0.3.0.7
     Severity:  Normal        |   Keywords:
Actual Points:                |  Parent ID:
       Points:                |   Reviewer:
      Sponsor:                |
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 We're measuring Tor performance using our OnionPerf tool by regularly
 downloading 5 MiB files over Tor. Some of these measurements run longer
 than 1 hour, after which a timeout in OnionPerf aborts them, or run for up
 to 30 minutes until they complete. (For comparison, 99% of successful runs
 complete within roughly two minutes.)

 I noticed one particular source of slowness which I think is the reason
 for the application timeouts after 1 hour and for some of the 1% slowest
 successful runs: streams stall for seconds or minutes and would even stall
 for hours if we let them, without making any progress; and suddenly they
 make progress until they complete or stall again.

 I'm attaching four graphs showing this problem. All these graphs show
 download progress over time with time on x and progress on y. Each gray
 bar is one measurement. The black line starts at the bottom of its gray
 bar and goes up to the top of that bar as more data is received. The
 number on the right is the stream ID.

 The first two graphs show application timeouts, the last two show the
 slowest 1% of successful runs. First and third show downloads from a
 public server, second and fourth from an onion server.

 Note that not all runs have this problem of stalling as described above.
 Some of the more obvious cases are:
  - Page 3, stream ID 436971: that stream basically does nothing for over
 half an hour and then completes within seconds.
  - Page 3, stream ID 436986: same as before, just with a shorter stalling
 period.

 Other cases have different issues. For example, stream ID 34117 on page 3
 is rather slow for most of the time and then suddenly gets faster at the
 end. However, it does not stall.

 I do have tor logs and tor controller event logs for these cases. Here's a
 log containing many relevant STREAM and STREAM_BW events:
 https://people.torproject.org/~karsten/volatile/streams-2019-02-18.log.xz
 (61.1K)

 These measurements have been made using tor versions 0.2.9.11-dev and
 0.3.0.7-dev.

 I can provide more data. But rather than uploading everything, please let
 me know what data would be most useful, and I'll provide just that.

--
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/29744>
Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki <https://trac.torproject.org/>
The Tor Project: anonymity online

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