Thus spake Tim Wilde (twilde@cymru.com):
We're not seeing source port exhaustion, but we are seeing two warns, one of which I haven't been able to nail down:
2011 Dec 13 20:22:07.000|[notice] We stalled too much while trying to write 8542 bytes to address "[scrubbed]". If this happens a lot, either something is wrong with your network connection, or something is wrong with theirs. (fd 409, type Directory, state 2, marked at main.c:990).
Hrm.. Haven't seen this one before...
2011 Dec 13 22:26:45.000|[warn] Your computer is too slow to handle this many circuit creation requests! Please consider using the MaxAdvertisedBandwidth config option or choosing a more restricted exit policy. [18 similar message(s) suppressed in last 60 seconds]
Ah, we should be handling this issue with the fix for #1984: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1984
The second warn I figure I should be tuning myself with MaxAdvertisedBandwidth, and it's happening on BigBoy, the relay on this box that's doing the majority of its bandwidth. So I'm not sure if it's anything that your feedback loop should be involved in or not.
It's a shame this log message makes such a crazy recommendation wrt MaxAdvertisedBandwidth. But I guess some tweak is better than no tweak. Hopefully we can make this go away without you needing to lower it, though. Can you ping me on IRC if you keep getting these warns after leaving MaxAdvertisedBandwidth alone?
One other data point, I have seen (also sporadically) some indications in my system logs of hardware hangs on the ethernet interface all of this is running through, so I'm slightly suspicious that it's to blame for the *Dragon problems. It doesn't really explain why BigBoy isn't affected though, and I haven't been able to definitively prove anything yet, so I'm just not sure.
This sounds incredibly familiar. What ethernet card + driver version do you have? Some combos of are pretty abysmal about IRQ load balancing and interrupt optimizations, or at least they were on old kernels (which may still apply if you are CentOS).