On Wed, Feb 21, 2007 at 02:09:31PM -0500, James Muir wrote:
I'd like to know how directories are cleaned up after a router leaves
the Tor network. I've read through the specs distributed with
0.1.2.7-alpha but I haven't been able to find a discussion on this.
Hm. You're right; this isn't documented well enough. Let me dig
through the code a little.
Once your router is no longer publishing router descriptors, the clock
starts ticking: it will no longer be included in the network status
documents the authorities generate after it's older then
MAX_AGE_TO_PUBLISH seconds old (currently, 20 hours, though we're
going to crank this up to something higher so clients don't need to
publish so often), the authorities won't include it in the network
status documents they generate.
Some clients may ask caches for the descriptor anyway, since they may
have older network status documents. Caches throw even old expired
descriptors away after OLD_ROUTER_DESC_MAX_AGE (currently 5 days).
It would be cool to have a patch to dir-spec.txt to document this
stuff, if it's not documented there somewhere already. :)