Provider Records: Do They Stay Alive Long Enough?

About this talk

At IPFS þing 2022 in Reykjavík, Mikel Cortes presents an early version of ProbeLab's measurement study on whether IPFS provider records actually stay alive for their intended 24-hour lifetime. He details the publication mechanics (K=20 closest peers via XOR distance, 12-hour republish interval) and his measurement tool, which publishes random CIDs, pings the original holders every 30 minutes, and re-runs DHT lookups to track the in-degree of those holders over time. The data shows publication is slow (median around 12 seconds per CID, 95th percentile up to 44 seconds), roughly two of the 20 chosen peers are unreachable at publish time, and the original holders remain stable and close to the CID well beyond 24 hours, with Hydra nodes notably continuing to serve records past the expiry due to slower garbage collection. Comparing K=15, 20, and 25, he finds little practical difference in retrievability and only marginal latency gains, leading him to argue that extending the republish interval beyond 12 hours is a more promising optimization than lowering K. The talk closes with an open discussion on dynamic per-node K values driven by content popularity and observed reachability.