[tor-dev] Running Tor with a 15MB memory limit

[Nathan Freitas]

I am currently supporting the iCepa project, an effort to get Tor to run
as a Network Extension VPN on iOS.

https://github.com/iCepa/iCepa

The good news is that, after a long time, we have the whole thing
somewhat working. The bad news is that after browsing a few pages
through Tor, the extension is shutdown due to going over the extremely
tiny 15MB available heap. More on this at:

https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/73148
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/networkextension

My question is, does anyone else have experience running Tor within some
extreme memory limits? Any guidance on configuring torrc for this? Any
thoughts on build flags or changes that might reduce memory usage?

We have already identified that the new compression features available
in recent versions of Tor consume more memory, and we may have to
disable those for now, for instance.

Thanks for any thoughts!

+n