Have you set AccountingMax in your torrc, by chance?

Also, you sure are restarting the relay a lot. You should learn how to use 'service reload' rather than 'service restart'. :)

No, I don't have AccountingMax enabled, which is one of the reasons why I was puzzled by the hibernation flag. Thanks for the tips on the service, I should have known better. I was restarting often because I was making adjustments to the DirPort and the hosted webpage (that .png thumbnail never loaded when it was offered locally, so I just linked to the hosted one on torproject.org) and it took a few tries before things were working right. Well, at least I won't be restarting Tor frequently going forward. Thanks.

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3. There are mysterious warnings in the log:

Jan 30 23:07:29.000 [warn] EXTEND cell received, but not via RELAY_EARLY. Dropping. [4 similar message(s) suppressed in last 3600 seconds] Jan 30 23:07:29.000 [warn] (We have dropped 95.24% of all EXTEND cells for this reason)

You don't happen to have set "ProtocolWarnings 1" in your torrc, have you?

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I'm familiar with the meaning of the "EXTEND" cell, but I'm not sure what RELAY_EARLY is

See https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/blob/HEAD:/proposals/110-avoid-inf... as motivated by http://freehaven.net/anonbib/#congestion-longpaths

My guess is that these are unofficial Tor clients you're seeing, and you're seeing them more because all official Tor clients are ignoring your relay until it gets out of 'phase one' (from the blog post).

Yes, I had ProtocolWarnings enabled, good eyes there. I had it on because I thought that it would help me see Tor-level security threats, but I think it's better with it off at least for now. Thanks for the help.

Jesse