Re: Many new connections per second [was Re: URGENT: patch needed ASAP for authority bug]

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 02:30:14PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 15, 2010 at 09:13:16AM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> > But that said, there does seem to be a problem here: we're seeing way
> > more directory requests than we were a few weeks ago. That's translating
> > into more connections seen by relays.
> > 
> > Is that because we're seeing way more users? Or are Tor clients generating
> > more directory requests than they "should"? Hm.
> 
> moria1 is seeing >1000 flows per second.
[snip]
> I'm going to take a closer look at it later tonight, and see if I can make
> some guesses about what's up -- that is, what changed in the past week.
> 
> Let us know if you find any hints. :)

In the case of moria1, it was because of some very old Tor clients:
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Oct-2008/msg00056.html
Looks like those very old Tor client versions are still around. I
generated a new set of v3 certs for moria1's old (obsolete) v3 key,
and for moria1's older (even more obsolete) v3 key, and it looks like
the problems have gone away for moria1. I was seeing about 70000 v3 key
cert requests per minute, and that's now down to about 40 per minute.

I wonder if anybody else's problems have gone away?

I also notice that moria1 is still seeing about 4000 requests a minute
for v2 status documents of v2 directory authorities that don't exist
anymore (namely the old moria1, moria2, and lefkada). When we retired the
old moria1 and moria2:
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jan-2010/msg00165.html
we basically killed the v2 directory protocol, meaning we made all
Tor 0.1.2.x and earlier clients stop working. But that isn't stopping
them from asking for network updates -- and if the average 0.1.2.x
client fetches a new v2 networkstatus from 1 of 5 v2 authorities every
30 minutes, that means we have several hundred thousand of these Tor
0.1.1.x or 0.1.2.x clients running right now. Gosh.

--Roger