[tor-talk] shutdown latencies

[Justin Aplin]

On Feb 15, 2012, at 12:48 PM, eliaz wrote:

> I'm currently maintaining a (normal) bridge from a machine running
> Vista.  I've set ShutdownWaitLength to 30 minutes in  torrc.

If this is actually set to 30 minutes, and not 30 seconds, I believe that's your problem; read below.

> When for
> some reason I have to press "Stop Tor" and get the message "Would you
> like to shut down gracefully and give clients time to find a new relay?"
> along with the red onion icon, what exactly does this mean?

It signals your node to stop accepting new connections, and not renew existing ones when they end. This allows those clients who were connected through your node to smoothly transition to a new node without interruption. At the end of the ShutdownWaitLength timeout, all connections are killed regardless, and the node shuts down. The red Vidalia icon indicates that the node is in the middle of this process, but has not yet shut down.

> The icon
> seems to sit there forever, and I'm loath to evoke Stop Tor again if it
> means killing the connection in the middle of someone's conversation. So
> I'm asking, When the red onion is up does it mean that people are
> actually still using my bridge, or that Vidalia's just waiting for the
> shutdown timeout to run its course?

As far as I know, the red icon indicates the former, as my nodes have a 30 second wait time, but frequently only sit in the "red phase" for 10-15 seconds.

~Justin Aplin