Well, it might also be related to the tor version is use.
In 15.05.1 you used 0.2.7.6 while in LEDE 17.01 the version is 0.2.9.9 and in LEDE master 0.2.9.10
You might need to tweak tor settings.
But as the newer Linux kernel takes a bit more memory, it is possible that your previous config causes tor's memory usage to exceed the available RAM amount after a while.
You might test again with 15.05.1 and look more closely into memory consumption (both system memory in general, and then specifically tor)
just because you wont bother to do some research doesn't mean that it doesn't work.
No, I have a life.
When an OS is released as 'stable', it should be stable. If I want pain and agony, and if I want a massive amount of my time to be wasted, then I will dedicate my life to trying to figure out why TOR keeps dying in Lede-17.01.0 -- or I will use Debian unstable (SID).
Since there's no device with the infinite RAM/storage just yet, I'm curious as to how would you suggest the "stable" swapless OS should behave when users install and run packages with requirements which exceed hardware capabilities?
I guess it would be quite some news to run Debian unstable and tor on a WNDR4300, even bog standard x86 would be quite challenging with 128 MB RAM (I'm not saying it's totally impossible (on x86), but neither the Debian kernel, respectively its initramfs, nor apt wil particularly appreciate running in such a constrained environment without special tweaking - that's before actually running any optional userspace services).
It did run fairly well in OpenWRT 15.05.1. What's the explanation for that?
And now with Lede-17.01.0 it doesn't work:
Apr 05 20:52:33.000 [notice] Bootstrapped 0%: Starting
Apr 05 20:58:32.000 [err] Out of memory on malloc(). Dying.
Point made: Lede-17.01.0 can work fine on 'legacy' devices, but don't be able to run additional services (like TOR) on these devices. If you want to run additional services, get a router/device with much more RAM than the legacy 2012 Netgear WNDR4300 (which only has 128 mb of RAM).