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by dfc 4753 days ago
Some people who are running tor on their pis are getting messages about your computer being to slow. If you see these messages and are curious about the cause arma posted a good explanation today to tor-relays:

The current theory is that these happen when your relay becomes the hidden service directory, or introduction point, for a popular hidden service. So these are basically roving hotspots that move around the network. In the case of the hidden service directory the pain lasts about a day, and in the case of the introduction point, it lasts for some function of the duration of the introduction point (could be a while) and the time that the hidden service descriptor is fresh (15 minutes or so). Based on the logs here, it sounds like it might be the introduction point in these cases.

Here are some tickets to look at:

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3825

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4862

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/8950

Also, the switch to the new ntor circuit-level handshake should reduce the cpu requirements for create cells (in addition to being more secure). So once more people have switched to ntor, these hotspots shouldn't be so bad. It is unclear if that's the same as 'shouldn't be bad'. :)

https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposa...

Full context:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2013-June/...