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I am a bit confused about handling streams in Tor. When we visit a website like Youtube the browser sends more than 100 requests to more than 20 different hosts. If we consider each request is for a TCP connection and, for the sake of anonymity, we cannot attach two streams to the same circuit, we need a bunch of circuits just for visiting a website.

I do not know what Tor actually does with streams. Are all streams for a website attached to the same circuit? or are they attached to distinct circuits? or Can we reuse circuits?, I mean, does Tor attach several streams to the same circuit?

Roya
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MOH
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1 Answers1

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Tor puts many streams onto a single circuit. If possible, the same circuit is used for up to 10 minutes -- see For how long does a circuit stay alive? for some details.

Accordingly, if you visit a website and it takes a hundred http connections to fetch it all, Tor will use the same circuit for all of that. If you stay on the website for a while and load more things, then after a while you'll move to a new circuit for your requests.

Community
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weasel - Peter Palfrader
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