Re: [tor-talk] high memory usage

[eliaz <eliaz@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Is it possible that someone using my bridge dropped something into my
system?

Thanks Jude. I don't think anonymity has been compromised, while running
the bridge I haven't used the client, being busy with other things. I
haven't had time yet for *nix. I've run VirtualBox for a couple of
years. (For the devil of it I've run Vidalia successfully in Win2K in
the VM, and also off a flash drive, but don't have any reason to think
those two ways would be any more secure than running off the Vista host
machine.)

Thanks too for Jon's & Robert Ransom's replies. I was running no extra
apps when this problem started. I'm using TBB 2.2.35-7.1, it's clean.
Looking at processes, I see way too many new svchosts. I'm running
tasklists in a batch file for the next few days to see what the svchosts
are carrying & what changes as the memory use rises. So far no malware
reported by AVG, I'll run a full system scan tonight. After that I'll
recheck my local & modem/router ports. The bridge has been carrying
traffic from up to 14 countries according to the bandwidth usage,
sometimes it's quite heavy. AFAICT the message log doesn't show anything
amiss. - eliaz | gpg ID: C3E1E38D

On 3/19/2012 12:40 AM, Jude Young wrote:
> On 03/18/2012 12:35 AM, eliaz wrote:
>> The only problem I have with the bridge I'm running is that for some
>> reason the memory used keeps climbing up, so that after three or four
>> days I have to reboot the machine. AFAICT rebooting doesn't affect the
>> bridge's usefulness much[snip][Running on Vistax64 2.5 GHz dual core
>> cpu, 4 G RAM] Thanks - eliaz
> 
> Weell, there's your problem.
> Your using windows.
> 
> That right there is enough to kill any anonymity even if your using Tor.
> Personally I have seen Windows machines become infected when:
> It wasn't being used except once a week,
> The user was one who had a reasonable knowledge of security (Me)
> Anti-Virus (actually did not detect it..)
> Incoming connections where heavily blocked (related,established)
> 
> 
> You have plenty of RAM, run a virtual machine (virtualbox works great)
> install debian on it (my personal choice) no gui.
> give it 256MB of ram, no swap. (that's a LOT for this setup...swap off
> so that instead of freezing it just kills the process)
> run Tor inside the VM.
> 
> Voila, ram usage will now NEVER exceed the size of the VM, and it's
> relatively easy to set up.
> CPU usage for the VM will also be really low.

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