On Wed, Dec 03, 2008 at 07:40:54PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In the manual page, there is: > ConnLimit NUM > The minimum number of file descriptors that must be available to the > Tor process before it will start.
Note that this is the *minimum* number. Basically the config option is not useful in this case. (Or most other cases.) > As for the design questions, I'll let someone else answer that as I > can't find the details as to why right now. Alas, right now the Tor design assumes that all relays can reach all other relays. Since clients choose paths randomly, and there are roughly 100 times more clients than there are relays, then pretty much every link is going to be in use. There are some research directions for "restricted route topologies", but they still have some hard challenges. One of the little ones is how to grow the topology such that it maintains small-worlds properties as new relays join and old relays disappear. One of the big ones is communicating the topology to the clients in an efficient way, so they can know which links they're allowed to use. Another big one is analyzing how much anonymity we lose by making route selection more predictable -- done right we shouldn't lose much, but I'd need to work out a lot more details before really believing it. The more long-term solution for this is to switch to UDP transport between relays. Done right, that basically means a few sockets would handle all the TLS connections (well, DTLS then), and Tor would get a lot smarter about handling the multiplexing between conversations internally. The proposals you've seen on here from Joel Reardon and from Camilo Viecco would move us in that direction. --Roger
