Context
We’re seeing a very large number of offline peers each week (latest graph here). Offline peers are defined as those that are seen online for 10% of time or less (IPFS DHT | ProbeLab). This might be affecting the churn that we’re seeing in the network as the churn cdf shows median lifetime of ~20 minutes but in reality will be lower since churn excludes nodes we have never contacted.
Such short-lived peers do not actually contribute to the network, as they fill other peers’ routing tables, but do not stay online to provide records, if they happen to store any.
More context in this GH issue: Large Number of Unresponsive Peers · Issue #57 · plprobelab/network-measurements · GitHub
Question
One way to deal with the situation is to avoid adding newly seen peers to other peers’ routing tables before they’re seen online for “long enough”. The question for the group is how long is “long enough”? 20mins, 30mins, 1h?