A Deep Dive into Provider Records

About this talk

In this IPFS Camp 2022 talk, Mikel Cortes presents a study on provider record liveness in the IPFS DHT, conducted in collaboration with ProbeLab. He explains how content publication actually distributes provider records (links between CIDs and provider PeerIDs) rather than the content itself, and walks through a methodology that publishes 10,000 CIDs without republishing, then probes the K=20 holders every 30 minutes for 36 hours. The results show that liveness is healthy, with a median of 18 successful initial connections and roughly 13 holders still serving records before the 24-hour expiry, while Hydra nodes prune more slowly due to their large databases. He also compares K values from 15 to 40, finding that publication latency scales roughly linearly with K while reachability stays similar, and demonstrates a Hydra-blacklisting experiment showing only modest cost in lookup hops and publish time. The takeaways argue for potentially lowering K from 20 to 15 and extending the 12-hour republish interval to reduce network overhead without harming retrievability.