IPFS Provider Record Liveness: Final Results

About this talk

Yiannis Psaras presents the final results of a joint ProbeLab and Barcelona Supercomputing Center study on IPFS provider record liveness, motivated by churn rates as high as 70% within two hours that could leave content unreachable before the 12-hour reprovide cycle. Using the CIDHoarder tool, the team published provider records and tracked how many of the 20 replica holders remained online and continued serving the records over time. Results show that roughly 15 of the 20 nodes keep records reachable for more than 35 hours even when Hydra boosters are excluded (around 12 nodes), and 15 of the originally selected peers remain among the K-closest to the CID over the same window. Based on these findings, the talk recommends reducing the replication factor K from 20 to 15 and at least doubling the reprovide interval from 12 to 24 hours, which together would cut provider-record-related overhead on content publishers by a substantial margin.