We've built a solution to scale our onion server horizontally using Kubernetes horizontal autoscaler. It's basically an onionbalance & a set of wrappers to regenerate its config file depending on the set of running TorHiddenService instances.

Each time we scale the set of servers up, we start new Tor onion servers on random addresses (that's what onionbalance expects), and their descriptors are then merged into the single one by onionbalance. When we delete old instances, their onion addresses are abandoned.

We want to be good citizens and not to clutter Tor's DHT with abandoned records. My question basically is whether the Tor ecosystem automatically deletes abandoned descriptors or not. If yes, we can keep our system simpler. If not, we'll have to make the system stateful and try to reuse our existing onions as much as possible.

Thanks.