Hi everyone,
We have created a platform to host images to our IPFS Cluster, take one image and some info related to it, then compile it into a PDF and host the PDF on the Cluster too. We then generate a public link to access the data via the classic ipfs.io/ipfs/ gateway.
This procedure worked perfectly since we initiated it a month ago. But oddly, since last week we had issues with PDFs loading indefinitely. What was odd with that behavior, was that only like 10% of the PDFs were actually loading when browsed. I tried a few things like switching distant gateways, using the localhost gateway through the locally run node, even from the IPFS Cluster servers, but no success.
However, since yesterday, when I log into my IPFS-files-management dApp 90% of the images are not loading anymore. I then restarted the VPSs where our Cluster peers are hosted, in fact they had been running without interruption for over a month and a half, so I thought they had some update pending or other stuff that a reboot could have solved. Suprisingly, the reboot made the loading of the images work again, but still no change with the PDFs.
As of this morning, I log back into the dApp, and boom, 50% of the images wont load again and of course PDFs too.
At first, I thought that the more complex structure of PDFs in comparison to a basic image could have played a role, then I remembered that the whole ipfs.io platform is hosted on IPFS lol
I had also thought that maybe it could be caused by the images / pdfs being not loaded for a long period of time and maybe lost in the IPFS network’s buffer, but the issue even happened with freshly uploaded images / pdfs…
If anyone has any idea of how to adress this, I am very open to suggestions
Update: While I was trying to get links to show examples of successfully and unsuccessfully loading images & PDFs (so opening each image and PDF one time, which amounts to 180 tries) it suddenly started to load again and now everything seems to load perfectly. What I can wildly guess, is that every file needs to be opened regularly to stay “alive” on the network ? That’s the only things I can deduce since I just switched from nothing loading to everything loading perfectly. I need to precise that it’s the first time that loading everything solved the problem since it appeared a week ago.
Update 2: The solving of the problem was short, 10 minutes later the PDFs wont load again…