Usually feels like
Minutes
You stay at the keyboard and it finishes there.
Every hop in a new path costs a full trip out and back, which puts the pause above a page load and well below anything you would walk away from.
The wait, in plain words
Something died. A page stopped halfway, a connection dropped, an address that answered a moment ago stopped answering, and the obvious move is to ask for a new circuit. The screen then does very little for a while.
What you asked for is a fresh route through the network, not a fresh copy of a page. Nothing is being fetched during the pause. A path is being chosen and negotiated, and only once it exists can anything be fetched over it.
It sits in this band because it ends at the keyboard and because it is genuinely several round trips long, each of them across machines run by strangers in places nobody consulted you about.
Underneath, while nothing moves
A circuit is built one hop at a time. Your client picks relays, opens a connection to the first, and negotiates keys with it. Then it extends through that relay to a second and negotiates again, then through both to a third. Every extension is a message that travels the whole distance and comes back. The cost is not the arithmetic. The cost is the waiting.
Reaching an address of this kind is more than that again. There is no ordinary destination to dial. Your client fetches a description of where the service is listening, contacts one of those points, and then both sides meet at a third relay chosen for the purpose. Each of those steps is another set of trips, which is why the first answer from an address is slower than anything you are used to and why rebuilding costs more than it feels like it should.
The new path is not chosen to be better than the old one. Selection spreads load and avoids obvious mistakes. It does not know that the relay it just handed you is on a saturated link, or that the machine is a hobby server on a domestic connection. You can leave a path that was merely slow and land on one that is worse.
| Stage of the pause | What is being waited on |
|---|---|
| Relays chosen | A route is picked from what your client already knows about the network. This part is instant and invisible. |
| Hops negotiated | Keys are agreed with each relay in turn, and each agreement is a full trip out and back. |
| Service located | A description of where the address is listening has to be fetched before anything can be aimed at it. |
| A meeting arranged | Both sides are told to meet at a relay picked for that job, and the tunnel is joined there. |
That is the trap in pressing for a new circuit repeatedly. Each press abandons a path before you have learned anything about it and buys another unknown. You are not sampling until you find a good one. You are paying the build cost over and over and never letting any path show you what it can do. A path you have actually used is a path you know something about. A path you built and discarded is a path you know nothing about.
Behaving, and not behaving
The difference between a rebuild that is worth doing and one that is not comes down to whether the failure is in the path or in the thing at the end of it.
A path being built
The pause is quiet and short lived, and when it ends the address that failed a moment ago starts answering normally.
A later attempt behaves differently from the earlier one. Different is the whole point. It means the route, not the destination, was the problem.
A path that will not help
Every fresh route lands on the same result, at the same speed, with the same message. Independent routes do not fail identically by accident.
Or the builds themselves stop completing, in which case the trouble is between your machine and the network rather than anywhere near the market.
When every route gives the same answer, the honest reading is that the address is not serving and rebuilding is the wrong tool. That is a wait with no ceiling in it, and it has its own card. When the builds themselves fail, the usual suspects are local: a clock that has drifted far enough for handshakes to be refused, a network that filters the connection before it leaves the building, or software left running long enough to have gone stale.
It is worth separating this from the gate screen. A gate means you reached the service and are being held by it. A failed build means you never got that far. Rebuilding helps the second case and does nothing whatever for the first.
Safe to do meanwhile
The build wants nothing from you, so the discipline is mostly about not interrupting it and not losing track of where you were.
- Let one path prove itselfUse it for something small before deciding it is bad.
- Write down which address you were onAfter several rebuilds it is easy to lose track of which one you were trying.
- Check the machine clockA clock far out of step breaks negotiation and looks exactly like a dead network.
- Read the band below this oneMost of what fails during a build fails in the waits that come before it.
What makes it longer
This wait is short by nature. It gets long mainly by being restarted.
- Asking for another circuit while one is still being built.
- Loading several heavy tabs at once, so a fresh path is congested before you have used it for anything.
- A restricted network that forces the connection through extra machinery before it reaches the network at all.
- A machine clock that has drifted, which turns every negotiation into a refusal.
- Rebuilding to fix something that was never a path problem, which costs you the build and teaches you nothing.
What this card is not. This card is not a guide to configuring anything on your own machine, and it does not tell you which relays you are on.