Libertas,

As I wrote to you earlier today, IPredator on Linux complained of similar 
issues with excessive calls to time() under the Linux 3.x kernel series, but 
not 2.6.

Let's track these issues in 
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/14056
as they appear to be quite similar.

I'd like to get a sense of how many calls per second this represents.
(400,000 would seem to be 100 to 1000 per second, unless you were debugging for 
a long while.)

I'd also like to know which function(s)/call stack(s) these calls are being 
made from. 

I wonder if TIME_IS_FAST is being defined as 1 in any of these Linux or BSD 
builds.
This 

If TIME_IS_FAST is not defined (the default), we could change these calls to 
approx_time(), which is much faster.
And in that case there should only be around 1 call to time() each second, 
which is clearly not the behaviour that either Libertas or IPredator are seeing.

Libertas, can you search your tor binary or tor debug symbols for the function 
"approx_time"?
grep will do this for you, or strings, or perhaps gdb if you feel like doing it 
the hard way.

I'll add these questions to trac ticket #14056 as well.

Libertas wrote:

> I just ran ktrace/kdump (used for observing system calls) on the Tor
> process of my exit node, which relays about 800 KB/s. It listed >400,000
> calls to gettimeofday(). The list was swamped with them.
> 
> I think I remember reading somewhere that that sort of system call is
> way slower in OpenBSD than Linux. Could this be related to the issue?
> I've found a lot of similarly mysterious slowdowns related to *BSD
> gettimeofday() on other projects' bug trackers, but nothing definitive.
> 
> As you've likely noticed, although I started this discussion I'm very
> new to system-level performance tuning. Let me know if I'm not making
> sense, or if there's something else I should be focusing on.
> 
>> <snip>



Attachment: signature.asc
Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail

_______________________________________________
tor-dev mailing list
tor-dev@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev

Reply via email to