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.
Doing so could make Libevent call Libevent from inside a Libevent
logging call, which is a recipe for reentrant confusion and
hard-to-debug crashes. This would especially hurt if Libevent
debug-level logging is enabled AND the user has a controller
watching for low-severity log messages.
Fix bug 2190; fix on 0.1.0.2-rc.
Doing so could make Libevent call Libevent from inside a Libevent
logging call, which is a recipe for reentrant confusion and
hard-to-debug crashes. This would especially hurt if Libevent
debug-level logging is enabled AND the user has a controller
watching for low-severity log messages.
Fix bug 2190; fix on 0.1.0.2-rc.
