How We Made IPFS Content Publishing 10x Faster

https://probelab.io/blog/optimistic-provide/

by dennis-tra • 21 days ago

183 60 21 days ago

Is it also possible to speed up lookup? I never used IPFS much as it took several minutes to find a cid.

Actually, lookup is super fast - CID lookup is consistently <200ms from the EU [0]. The original slowness came mostly from stale records and NAT’d peers that were indexed in the DHT which has since been mostly resolved.

[0] https://probelab.io/ipfs/dht/#chart-ipfs-dht-lookup-performa...

yiannisbot• 21 days ago

When’s the last time you tried? It must be much faster now. Check: https://probelab.io/ipfs/dht/#chart-ipfs-dht-lookup-performa...

esperent• 21 days ago

Do you have any examples of actual content to look up, rather than benchmark graphs?

embedding-shape• 21 days ago

Return control back to the user after most (not all) of the PUT RPCs have succeeded and continue with the remaining ones in the background.

Making things faster by doing less (and not the same) been speeding up computing since forever! Can't help but feel like it's slightly misleading to call the providing ("publishing") faster when it's not actually doing the same, it's just that most parts turned async instead of waiting for confirmation.

Wouldn't this lead to the problem where the user things everything been provided properly, but once others try to find it, the records haven't yet been published? As far as I understand, it'd still take mostly the same amount of time until the entire CID (not just some of them) are available to others, the only thing that got "faster" is the end-user UX of the one providing?

Groxx• 21 days ago

The "Early Return" sections describe it more, I don't think it's as bad as it sounds in that first bullet. They're returning after 15 out of 20 complete,and it sounds like even if only those 15 end up succeeding it'll still generally be fine. (Exactly how fine / is that violating some common expectations and will cause problems: I dunno. Not familiar enough with IPFS's internals)

That said:

In practice, at least one of the 20 follow-up requests fails in the vast majority of operations, and a single unresponsive peer can stall the entire phase waiting for a timeout.

It continually surprises me how often systems lack a Fast Fallback-like strategy¹. Or at least sound like it. Just an absolute flood of apps and websites and systems that try to do something once and then never tried an alternate route until that finishes, something like a minute or two later... for a process that usually takes less than a second. It's maddening. By the time you're considering one to be "stalled" and delaying everything unnecessarily, you probably should've already started trying two or three alternate routes!

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Eyeballs

WorldMaker• 21 days ago

(Exactly how fine / is that violating some common expectations and will cause problems: I dunno. Not familiar enough with IPFS's internals)

I felt the article addressed that a bit further down. 20 copies is a somewhat arbitrary knob in the Kademlia DHT design IPFS is based on and this lab's research suggested that 15 was probably closer to good enough for GET requests to succeed at about the same time cost. Rather than dropping the knob for the entire DHT, because redundancy is always useful in the long run they went with the Early Return and a secondary process called the Reprovide Sweep that still tries to push the network towards the 20 live copies minimum it desires.

I'm assuming the Reprovide Sweep was work previously done/documented because it seems like something that might have been more interesting to discuss at longer length in relevant parts of the article.

pocksuppet• 21 days ago

As far as I understand, the producer is publishing to the 20 nearest nodes it finds, but the consumer is also searching the 20 nearest nodes it finds, and there is quite a big safety margin built into that number 20. Almost all consumers should still be able to find your object once it has only published to 10 or 15.

This is a probabilistic system anyway. Even if publication finishes to 20 nodes, why is that enough to return to the caller? Shouldn't it be 30, or 50, just in case?

I'd say it makes sense to return control once zero PUTs have been made and do the whole thing in the background, to avoid serializing operations that usually don't need to be serialized, such as publishing multiple objects.

nekusar• 21 days ago

Are the defaults still leaking your whole internal and external IP allocations to the dHT still?

Its security posture was absolutely fucking gross the last time I reviewed it.

And of course, there's a shitcoin bolted on as well. Last thing I want to do is feed into FileCoin. Of course, everything new these days has some financial interaction crap bolted on to entice speculators and ilk.

catapart2• 21 days ago

I'll add to the "is it still...?" questions.

Last I was told about it, there was no way to delete stuff from IPFS. Nothing enforceable, at least. Setting aside that public stuff is "impossible" to delete on the internet, there's something appealing to me about being able to shut off my server. Feels like that is less possible with IPFS hosted content.

Does anyone have some perspective for me about removing content?

deno• 21 days ago

Imagine you created a torrent (and/or magnet link) with a file and then stopped seeding after some time. If it was popular it will probably live on, if not then eventually it disappears.

catapart2• 21 days ago

Thanks! Yeah, I kind of figured that was still the case. Not really any use cases I have that I would feel comfortable with that paradigm, but I'm glad it's available!

boramalper8• 21 days ago

Is anyone still (or has anyone ever) used IPFS in production?

I’m not talking about technology demos such as Wikipedia-on-IPFS (which indeed worked and was impressive) but where IPFS is actually being relied on for some functionality.

pixel_popping• 21 days ago

It's funny because even in Piracy, IPFS has never really taken off and that's a massive use case.

frollogaston3• 21 days ago

Also public key lists like what Whatsapp now publishes

boramalper8• 21 days ago

It slowly was taking off—e.g. Library Genesis on IPFS[0]—but then IPFS introduced Bad Bits Denylist [1] which killed it on arrival.

[0] https://freeread.org/ipfs.html

[1] https://badbits.dwebops.pub/

MattCruikshank• 21 days ago

It doesn't seem like it's popular to put old game ROMs on IPFS...? And that surprises me...

boramalper8• 21 days ago

And why would you do that? As opposed to, say, distributing via BitTorrent or serving them using a good-old HTTP server?

edit: Not opposed to the idea, just curious what makes you pick IPFS over the existing alternatives.

errpunktjose• 21 days ago

https://swap.cow.fi uses it for order metadata registering iirc

frollogaston3• 21 days ago

NFT artwork, if you count that. Briefly checked, the ones that were traded for the most were using IPFS rather than HTTP. But I also don't trust that these aren't self-wash sales (easy given the "NF" part), also NFTs are dumb.

boramalper8• 21 days ago

I don’t think NFTs (should) count: My first impressions of web3 by Moxie Marlinspike

https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

Borg32• 21 days ago

Yeah.. IPFS is a bit disappointement. I was a bit exceited about it back in the day. Recently, I wanted to download sth large from archive.org, I used torrent (and my legacy torrent client) and it worked like a charm!

It seems pure HTTP tracker + Torrent is good enough.

boramalper8• 21 days ago

I think the biggest sin of IPFS is not working natively in web browsers—instead, requiring the use of either HTTP gateways or native apps running outside the browser.

ydj2• 21 days ago

At meta, there was a project for delivering binaries of internally built libraries / binaries to dev laptops using a private ipfs network. This was live for at least some period of time.

boramalper8• 21 days ago

Very interesting! I wonder if it’s still live and there is any writing on it?

ValdikSS4• 21 days ago

I use it for about 5 years, to publish javascript file (proxy auto-configuration) and serve the contents over different gateways.

It is a huge server traffic saver.

Used to use it to host different static websites on custom domains while Cloudflare's gateway was working, stopped using it for this purpose since its sunset in 2024.

Neocities used to publish their websites over IPFS, this feature got broken (for years) and finally got removed: https://github.com/neocities/neocities/issues/352

ValdikSS4• 21 days ago

Also used it several times for almost-live video broadcasts, served over cloudflare ipfs gateway while it was working.

It used HLS with .ts files, in a special way which circumvented cloudflare protection against .mp4 and .ts files, or something along the lines. Don't remember the details, but it was a cheap way to deliver your stream to any video player using standard protocols only.

preisschild2• 21 days ago

the containerd stargz snapshotter has an IPFS integration so you can use IPFS instead of a traditional OCI registry to store your OCI containers

Not using it in production but i found it pretty cool to test

phae• 21 days ago

the thing that prevented me using ipfs in anger.. (granted i may not have looked hard enough) was that i couldn't have stuff in ipfs, and access it via posix filesystem at he same time. i'd have to store things twice.

fine for publishing, but not for having a live data set that is both used and published at the same time, as you can do with torrent.

preisschild2• 20 days ago

was that i couldn't have stuff in ipfs, and access it via posix filesystem at he same time.

Maybe this is possible to implement using fuse/9p fs

OneDeuxTriSeiGo• 21 days ago

It's not literally IPFS but atproto/bluesky is using most of the bones of IPFS (IPLD) to do their entire data propagation and event broadcasting.

And tbh it shouldn't be terribly difficult to extend the existing infra to supporting a full IPFS based system but I don't think anybody has considered it worthwhile yet.

ATproto uses just the bits it immediately needs even if it could probably benefit from the other parts long term (ex for archival relay stream preservation).

bergie• 21 days ago

Back when I was working at a website builder, we used IPFS for distributing content between our serving clusters.

If also made the sites available on IPFS, but that was a secondary concern.

hannesfur• 21 days ago

Having worked on libp2p‘s DHT (Double Hashing for rust-libp2p) for a bit two years ago, it’s really great to see that there are improvements. To get to CDN level speeds though on dense networks, I still see it as an architectural flaw to not somehow encode network topology into the PeerID / identity in the DHT. A start would be to use the five RIRs. If you want to be more sophisticated, and I spent a lot of time theorising about this, you could have a dezentrally governed anycast IP address of Geo DNS to bootstrap new peers into their neighbourhood and couple that into their DHT identity. But do you want to put BGP into the hands of a decentralised system? Could you even do it in the governance structure of the internet?

Btw when we were working on our project HyveOS, we used Batman-advs routing table to quickly (really really quick) bootstrap new peers into the system.

Ah… sometimes i really miss working on this.

yangm97• 16 days ago

We shouldn’t expect bodies and companies that benefit from centralization to give us crumbs. Remember IPv6 global multicast? ISPs killed that on sight.

We need to get encrypted mesh networking (Yggdrasil, CJDNS, FIPS etc) out there before it’s too late.

davidwritesbugs• 21 days ago

Slightly tangential to the article, which seems interesting, but the main issue with IPFS was the horrendous performance of clients which I seem to recall related to having a refresh storms, sparse routing tables, unreachable peers as well as lookup speeds. Mostly the reputation was so bad that people didn't bother with it, I dismissed it for my own project. If your only users are crypto-grift projects you're in a bad place.

hyp0thetical• 21 days ago

Did you ever try to keep files on a really good storage?

gumboshoes• 19 days ago

Am I the only one who has never managed to get an IPFS file to successfully download?

How We Made IPFS Content Publishing 10x Faster

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