Asking for a new circuit, and how small a lever it is

Tor Browser offers a new circuit for the current site. It is worth knowing precisely which parts of the picture that moves and which parts it leaves untouched.

What the action does

Choosing a new circuit for a site tells the client to stop using the current path for that site and build another one, then reload. Fresh middle positions are drawn. For a connection to an address ending in .onion, the meeting relay is renegotiated too, so the join point moves as well.

The old relays keep whatever they already had, which is a closed record of a circuit that carried some traffic for a while. Nothing is retracted. The change is forward looking only: new positions carry what comes next.

What it does not change: your first relay

The first hop normally stays exactly where it is, and that is deliberate rather than an oversight. The reasoning is set out in the entry guard card: a stable first position turns a repeated gamble into a single one, which is the safer arrangement over a long period of ordinary use.

So the observer holding your real network address is the same party before and after. Whatever pattern of connection times that operator could see, it continues uninterrupted across every new circuit you request. If your reason for pressing the menu item was to become unfamiliar to the machine you connect to directly, the action does not do that.

What it does nothing about at all

• The account. If you are signed in, you remain signed in, and the server continues the same session. See signing in.
• Anything already recorded at the far end. Orders, messages, balances and timestamps are rows in a database and are not affected by network paths. The whole market section is about that observer.
• Anything already written to your own machine, including cache, history and downloads. See what lands on the disk.
• A delivery address you have already submitted. Once it has been typed into a form it belongs to the recipient, which is the delivery address you hand over.
• A parcel. There is no property of any circuit that touches an object moving through a postal system.
• The fact that your line carries Tor traffic. That has been visible since the client started, and a new path does not interrupt it.

The identity you keep across circuits

This is the most common misreading of the feature, so it deserves stating without hedging. A server does not recognise you by your network path. It recognises you by a session, a cookie, an account name and a password you supplied. Change every relay in the path and the server still sees the same signed in user continuing the same visit.

That means a new circuit is not a way of appearing to be somebody else to a site. It changes which strangers carry the traffic. It does not change who the traffic says you are when it arrives.

When people reach for it, and what they are actually solving

The usual trigger is a page that will not load, or one that loads badly. Sometimes a fresh path helps, because a relay in the current one is overloaded or unreliable, and the traffic simply moves onto machines that are behaving better. That is a real and legitimate use, and it is a network quality fix rather than a privacy one.

What it cannot do is make something reachable that is not. If a service is not answering, the path is not the reason, and no amount of rebuilding produces a different answer. This site does not publish whether any address responds and does not check, so it is not going to tell you what to conclude from a page that fails to load.

The other common trigger is a vague sense that a session has gone on too long and should be freshened. If that is the worry, the honest lever is the length of the session itself rather than the path inside it, and that is how long the session stays open.

A stronger version of the same instinct

Tor Browser also offers to discard the whole browsing state and start again, which closes tabs, clears the session in the browser and builds new paths. That is a bigger action than a new circuit for one site, because it deals with the browser side identity rather than only the relays.

Even then, the same limits apply at both ends. Your first relay is unchanged, and the far end still holds everything it recorded while you were signed in. Discarding a browser session removes your copy of it, not the copy that lives on a server.

What changes the answer

5 things change how much this action gives away. None of them takes it to zero, and none of them is a promise.

1. Signing out is the action that addresses the sessionA new path leaves an authenticated session running. Ending the session is what stops the far end attributing further activity to the same visit, although it does not remove what was already attributed. See signing in.
2. Closing the client bounds the record your line producesCircuit changes happen inside a connection that is already visible. Ending it is what closes the entry your ISP and your first relay are keeping. See how long the session stays open.
3. Nothing in the browser reaches the far end databaseClearing local state changes your machine, not a server. Everything under the market section stays exactly as it was recorded.
4. The relays you leave behind keep their recordA relay you stop using does not forget. It holds a closed circuit record, which for a middle position is very little anyway, as the middle relay explains.
5. Use it for what it is good atMoving off a slow or unreliable relay is a genuine use with a visible result. Treating it as a privacy reset is where the expectation runs ahead of the mechanism.

What this card is not

This card is not a troubleshooting routine and it does not tell you what a failure to load means. It describes which observers change when a path is rebuilt.