Why does Tor Metrics show my bridge offline after a few days?

Question

I've been running a Tor Bridge for about a month now. Every day I check the system logs to ensure the bridge hasn't broken. I also check Tor Metrics to see the data on my bridge. Twice now, I have experienced Tor Metrics show my bridge offline, when my logs show all is well. Both times it started happening around 5-6 days of uptime.

The first time it happened, I let it run for another 10 days or so without rebooting. My logs continued to show unique clients, multiple circuits open, and data continuing to move through my bridge. However, Tor Metrics would consistently show my bridge offline with ~30-60 minutes of downtime. It was almost like Tor Metrics thought I was rebooting the service every 45 minutes. After I finally rebooted the machine, Tor Metrics showed perfect uptime again for about 5-6 days. Now, it is again showing offline, when my Tor Bridge is still running.

I'm running Tor 0.4.6.10 on Ubuntu 20.04.4. I'm curious if anyone has run into this issue and/or what I can do to resolve this issue. Let me know if I can provide any additional information.

Answer 1

This usually happens with the tor metrics and it's not like your bridge is broken but tor metrics store the stats about bridges on their backend system for further stats and all. Holding a large amount of data on the server causes downtime and crashes once in a while. And that period of time the information about some bridges get broken as can be seen in the stat graphs thus concluding the bridge to be offline. So there is nothing to worry about.