[tor-dev] Patches to improve mobile hidden service performance

[Michael Rogers]

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Hi all,

I've been experimenting with small changes to Tor to improve the
performance of mobile hidden services. The following patches for Tor
and jtorctl make two performance improvements:

1. Each time the network's enabled, don't try to build introduction
circuits until we've successfully built a circuit. This avoids a
problem where we'd try to build introduction circuits immediately, all
the circuits would fail, and we'd wait for 5 minutes before trying again.

2. Added a command to the control protocol to purge any cached state
relating to a specified hidden service. This command can be used
before trying to connect to the service to force Tor to download a
fresh descriptor. It's a more fine-grained alternative to SIGNAL
NEWNYM, which purges all cached descriptors and also discards circuits.

https://code.briarproject.org/akwizgran/briar/blob/9e5e2e2df24d84135f14adaa42111c3ea2c55df8/tor.patch

https://code.briarproject.org/akwizgran/briar/blob/9e5e2e2df24d84135f14adaa42111c3ea2c55df8/jtorctl.patch

The Tor patch is based on the tor-0.2.24 tag, and the jtorctl patch is
based on the Guardian Project's repo, which is ahead of the upstream
repo (n8fr8 needs commit privileges for upstream, I think).

https://github.com/guardianproject/jtorctl

I've only done small-scale testing of these patches so far. If they
seems like they might be useful I'll create a trac ticket to merge them.

Cheers,
Michael
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