Re: running tor on a vserver

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jul 08, 2007 at 11:24:12PM +0200, sigi wrote:
> I played a little with BandwidtRate & -Burst, but the warn-logs showed 
> up again everytime, two hours after restarting tor...
> With some friendly help of another tor-user I found the option 
> ConnLimit, which I put into my torrc - and 'ConnLimit 90' has solved the 
> problem. My server is running longer than 2 hours for now, without 
> errors for the first time.

I'm afraid ConnLimit won't do what you expect. Here's the man page
entry for it:

      The minimum number of file descriptors that must be available to
      the Tor process before it will start. Tor will ask the OS for as
      many file descriptors as the OS will allow (you can find this by
      "ulimit -H -n"). If this number is less than ConnLimit, then Tor
      will refuse to start.

      You probably don't need to adjust this. It has no effect on Win-
      dows since that platform lacks getrlimit(). (Default: 1000)

We should probably rename it MinConn or something like that -- or get
rid of it entirely. To repeat: Saying "ConnLimit 90" will have no effect
on your situation.

(Some people want us to implement some sort of maximum connections open at
a time feature -- but that would cause you to refuse 'extend' operations,
and potentially turn you into a useless Tor server. Until we have a plan
for a non-clique topology (also known as a restricted-route topology)
that doesn't screw up the anonymity we can offer, the best we can answer
is that you need to be able to handle many sockets if you want to be
a server.)

--Roger