[tor-talk] Reasoning behind 10 minute circuit switch?

[Nick Mathewson]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 12:17 PM, Greg Norcie <gnorcie at umail.iu.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on doing a study on user tolerance of delays (for example,
> latency on Tor).
>
> During our discussion, a bit of a debate occured about the TBB's circuit
> switching. I was wondering if there's any research that's been done to
> arrive at the 10 minute window for circuit switching, or if that was number
> picked arbitrarily?

If I'm reading the source right:  Back before commit
d2400a5afd70b009b632b307205273fc25c8cd92 from 2005, the number was 30
seconds.  But that was too short and led to unacceptable performance.
So Roger picked 10 minutes more or less intuitively.

yrs,
-- 
Nick