[tor-relays] Memory Problems with tor releay

[tor-relay.dirk at o.banes.ch]

Dear all,

we are operating two exit nodes with each two tor processes out of
Switzerland.
The nodes worked quite stable until about 2-3 weeks ago.

Since then we experience frequent disruptions (Up to several times a
day). This is caused by a significant rise in memory consumption
by the tor processes and ends with a tor process being killed by the
Linux Kernel:

May 22 00:30:43 tor2 kernel: [2257156.134100] Killed process 40964 (tor)
total-vm:448088kB, anon-rss:0kB, file-rss:0kB

The systems are physical machines with Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS with 4 GB of
memory. This was sufficient the last 2 years.

For more details a sample of this behavior is documented in a Ticket [1].
Tor project team is researching but until now no hints lead to an
improvement.

Due to a tweet last week [2] and the follow up discussion with another
operator I became suspicious that is not just
just us having a problem rather it cloud be more common.

Therefore here the question to you all - do you experience some strange
behavior like described in the ticket as well ?

Please let me know if so.

If not - maybe it is just an unfortunate coincidence and we will end up
make a clean install of both server hoping the problem will go away.


best regards

Dirk


[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22255

[2]https://twitter.com/FrennVunDerEnn/status/864583496072876034