Tor Hidden Service circuit timeout
It is common to contact frequently a certain set of Tor Hidden Services while you may contact very sporadically others. This is particularly important in the tor2web use case.
Currently Tor circuits have a timeout of 10 minutes. It would be nice to be able to set a timeout setting for tearing down a particular circuit towards a certain hidden service.
There are a few ways of achieving:
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Having this feature built into Tor Tor will learn what are the most visited tor hidden services and sets a particular keep alive based on statistics collected. This factor would change over time and be always more precise (?) This is probably a bad idea as it requires having a specific purpose use feature into Tor proper (Q: Would this feature be of benefit to regular users?)
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Having this feature built into TorCtl Currently it is not possible to set the timeout of a particular circuit to a specific time. It would be nice to specify via TorCtl that a certain circuit should live for a certain amount of time. This might not be good because it requires changes to Tor, although just the TorCtl part.
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Hacking our way into making it work with current Tor It is possible to set a very big timeout (5 years?) through TorCtl for all circuits. You can then cycle through the circuits and understand which ones have been alive for your established timeout and kill them. This is cheap to implement and doesn't require modification of current Tor.