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I have a VPS (virtual private server) and I have set up a hidden service on it. The hidden service is accessible at http://tor.kaankolkoy.net (try it via tor browser). Everything working fine!

I was searching for Tor's equivalent to /var/log/apache2/access_log and found /var/log/tor.log. This file was interesting for me because I didn't set up a relay server and I can't find my server on http://atlas.torproject.org/ using my server's IP, yet these are in my tor.log file:

Oct 03 10:36:35.000 [notice] Heartbeat: Tor's uptime is 7 days 0:00 hours, with 7 circuits open. I've sent 12.95 MB and received 72.74 MB.
Oct 03 10:36:35.000 [notice] Average packaged cell fullness: 84.164%
Oct 03 10:36:35.000 [notice] TLS write overhead: 5%

Why did my server send and receive those bytes?

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2 Answers 2

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These log entries are just for notification (Loglevel notice) and provide general information. Tor writes these lines also when it is configured as client. They just tell you that Tor lives and transmitted some data.

If you don't want these log lines go to your torrc and look for lines starting with Log notice. Comment them out and restart your Tor process. Now Tor doesn't log anymore. If you're using Debian make sure to also look into /usr/share/tor/tor-service-defaults-torrc. You'll find some default settings there.

Here are some answers about log entries that also might help:

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That's not a huge amount of traffic and 7 days is a long time, so I doubt there's anything to worry about.

It's likely that your tor process sent and received those bytes downloading network status documents such as the Tor consensus. Additionally it would have sent and received a small amount of traffic because Tor hidden services regularly publish what's called hidden service descriptors. These are files that are required by clients of your hidden service to connect to your hidden service.

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  • ~300MByte download per month for documents? Also, logs said "7 circuits", it is mean tor connection, isn't it?
    – Kaan Kölköy
    Oct 9, 2014 at 10:06

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