Load Balancing

[Nick Mathewson]

On Fri, Sep 21, 2007 at 08:34:09PM +0200, Alexander W. Janssen wrote:
> On 9/21/07, Arrakis <arrakistor at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hey guys, quick question.
> >
> > If I have Tor process running, and request a url that has 10 images to
> > load from the same domain, do all the requests go through the same
> > circuit, or does the tor process split up the requests across all the
> > circuits?
> 
> Interesting question. From what I understood a new circuit is created
> for every TCP-connection. If your browser grabs, for instance, 6
> images at the same time (6 loading instances == connections), Tor
> should open 6 different circuits.
>
> However, considering your question... It doesn't sound too efficient
> to me... The slides say "If the user wants to access a different site,
> Alice's Tor client selects a different path."
> I'm curious how strict I should read that...

Damn, that slide (on overview.html) is so wrong.  I can't believe
nobody's noticed this before. :(

For more accurate info, see path-spec.txt (section 1 and section 3)
and the design paper (subsection entitled "Circuits and streams" and
subsection entitled "Opening and closing streams").

Short answer: Tor tries to group many streams on a single circuit.  If
we didn't, that would be way too much PK.

yrs,
-- 
Nick Mathewson
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