IPFS Network Measurements and Improvement Opportunities
Yiannis Psaras
About this talk
Yiannis Psaras introduces the IPFS Observatory, a measurement effort aimed at identifying bottlenecks and quantifying improvements in libp2p and IPFS protocols. He walks through two concrete findings: the content provide process takes tens to over 100 seconds but the relevant peers are typically discovered within the first second (motivating the Optimistic Provide work), and the Bitswap broadcast step adds a roughly one-second delay before the DHT lookup begins despite a low discovery rate. The talk also covers results from the Nebula crawler, including a roughly two-hour median session length, agent version uptake comparisons showing Kubo 0.9 as more stable than newer releases, churn behaviour of Hydra boosters, and the surprising finding that under 2% of IPFS nodes run on major cloud providers while the top 10 ASes hold around 65% of observed addresses. Psaras outlines further studies on hole-punching success rates, GossipSub performance, and DHT routing table health, and points to the dgm.xyz grants platform and an upcoming academic workshop for community involvement.