The reason the "streams problem" occurs is due to the complicated
interaction between Tor's congestion control and libevent. At some point
during the experiment, the circuit window is exhausted, which blocks all
edge streams. When a circuit level sendme is received at Exit, it
resumes edge reading by looping over linked list of edge streams, and
calling connection_start_reading() to inform libevent to resume reading.
When the streams are activated again, Tor gets the chance to service the
first three streams activated before the circuit window is exhausted
again, which causes all streams to be blocked again. As an experiment,
we reversed the order in which the streams are activated, and indeed the
first three streams, rather than the last three, got service, while the
others starved.
Our solution is to change the order in which streams are activated. We
choose a random edge connection from the linked list, and then we
activate streams starting from that chosen stream. When we reach the end
of the list, then we continue from the head of the list until our chosen
stream (treating the linked list as a circular linked list). It would
probably be better to actually remember which streams have received
service recently, but this way is simple and effective.
Sebastian notes (and I think correctly) that one of our ||s should
have been an &&, which simplifies a boolean expression to decide
whether to replace bridges. I'm also refactoring out the negation at
the start of the expression, to make it more readable.
Pick 5 seconds as the limit. 5 seconds is a compromise here between
making sure the user notices that the bad behaviour is (still) happening
and not spamming their log too much needlessly (the log message is
pretty long). We also keep warning every time if safesocks is
specified, because then the user presumably wants to hear about every
blocked instance.
(This is based on the original patch by Sebastian, then backported to
0.2.2 and with warnings split into their own function.)
Our checks that we don't exceed the 50 KB size limit of extra-info
descriptors apparently failed. This patch fixes these checks and reserves
another 250 bytes for appending the signature. Fixes bug 2183.
Sending a log message to a control port can cause Tor to allocate a buffer,
thereby changing the length of the freelist behind buf_shrink_freelists's back,
thereby causing an assertion to fail.
Fixes bug #1125.
Sending a log message to a control port can cause Tor to allocate a buffer,
thereby changing the length of the freelist behind buf_shrink_freelists's back,
thereby causing an assertion to fail.
Fixes bug #1125.
