I was just at an event with a slow (but reliable) network and Tor was not able to connect; the "Loading relay descriptors" step just took too long.
At some point I got an error message that indicated that it was giving up but that I had enough information to connect to onion addresses. I can't reproduce the problem now on a normal network, and I just went through the Tor code looking for the error message I saw, but I couldn't find it.
But I figured I'd ask here to see if anyone was familiar with shortcuts Tor can take in its connection process that safely save time and bandwidth on slow connections if the only thing I intend to use Tor for is connecting to onion addresses.
Are there any steps in bootstrapping that can be skipped if I only care about making and receiving onion address connections?
Holmes