[tor-dev] Quickly testing TOR using Chutney and Fluxcapacitor

[Nick Mathewson]

On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Marek Majkowski <marek at popcount.org> wrote:
> Tor ships with some testing facilities (tor/src/test/test), but they
> are not comprehensive.  (I'm aware there's an ongoing effort on
> improving these tests).
>
> To test anything non trivial it is necessary to run a tor node as a
> part of a tor network. There is another tool called chutney [1] that
> can be used to set up a small testing Tor network: it generates plenty
> of torrc configs and spawns a number of Tor servers locally.
>
> This is very handy, but it can take a while before the network starts
> working - the Auth servers need to establish the consensus and do all
> the things I have no clue about.
>
> Here's a simple shell script [2]:
>  - It uses chutney to start a testing tor network.
>  - It waits for it to work by trying to establish a connection to localhost:22.
>  - Finally it tears down the network.
>
> Normally it takes around 5 minutes for the network to converge:
>
> $ time ./go.sh
> real    4m8.330s
> user    0m2.064s
> sys     0m0.392s
>
> Of course, you don't have to set a completely fresh Tor network for
> every single test, but that's what I often do. I'd be eager to hear
> how people are reusing chutney networks.
>
> In past I wrote this thing called fluxcapacitor [3], it's a tool that
> speeds up tests. After a few fixes I was able to run chutney on it:
>
> $ time /tmp/fluxcapacitor/fluxcapacitor ./go.sh
>
> real    0m11.450s
> user    0m2.340s
> sys     0m2.120s
>
> Running stuff under fluxcapacitor is not deterministic, sometimes it
> takes 8 seconds, sometimes 15 but it generally works and should go
> pretty quick.
>
> That's it. I thought someone may find it useful.
>
> Cheers,
>     Marek

Thanks, Marek!  This looks quite useful.  Can you talk a bit more
about under what circumstances (if any) the fluxcapacitor code there
might give incorrect results?

Also, I had thought the quick-and-dirty chutney test we shipped (via
./src/test/test-network.sh)  bootstrapped in faster than 5 minutes.
Am I wrong there? Does it use any tricks that might be helpful in
combination with fluxcapacitor?

best wishes,
-- 
Nick