How often does Tor change its paths?
Tor will reuse the same circuit for new TCP streams for 10 minutes, as long as the circuit is working fine. (If the circuit fails, Tor will switch to a new circuit immediately.) But note that a single TCP stream (e.g. a long IRC connection) will stay on the same circuit forever — we don’t rotate individual streams from one circuit to the next. Otherwise an adversary with a partial view of the network would be given many chances over time to link you to your destination, rather than just one chance.
