After a longer than usual gap, and following up from our previous report in Week 10, 2026 on the notable results on IPFS’s performance ( ProbeLab's Notable IPFS Performance Results - Week 10, 2026 ), here is ProbeLab’s update on the state of the IPFS network over the past few weeks.
The intention of these reports is to celebrate improvements, but also direct efforts to parts of the protocol that need attention. Here are the most noteworthy highlights for Week 18 (April 27th) and the several weeks preceding this:
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Stable number of DHT server nodes, but substantial increase of DHT client nodes: https://probelab.io/ipfs/#chart-ipfs-servers-vs-clients-ts
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There have been 525k DHT client nodes seen last week, almost double as much as those seen two weeks ago (6th to 12th of April).
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The number of distinct DHT server IP addresses is continuing to remain stable around 23k-24k.
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Traditionally, IPFS bootstrappers are reliable and do not present any performance fluctuations: https://probelab.io/ipfs/bootstrappers/.
- That said, there has been an outage, as observed by our infrastructure, that lasted for three days (24th to 27th of April), but only for the WebSocket transport: https://probelab.io/ipfs/bootstrappers/#chart-bootstrappers-stlibp2p_connect_websocket
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Probably the biggest highlight is Kubo’s Publish performance, which, since last November (after v0.39), has decreased by an order of magnitude from more than 14s to less than 1s: https://probelab.io/ipfs/kubo/#chart-kubo-publish-performance-ts.
- This is due to the Optimistic Provide improvement, originally proposed by ProbeLab. See our extensive blogpost which gives all the details: https://probelab.io/blog/optimistic-provide/
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The DHT Lookup performance has gradually decreased after the mid of March and remained relatively stable since, hovering just above 0.3s: https://probelab.io/ipfs/dht/#chart-ipfs-dht-lookup-performance-ts
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There’s a slight increase in the number of Daily Unique CIDs seen in the network during the past week (since 22nd April) to more than 120M from less than 100M two weeks ago: https://probelab.io/ipfs/bitswap/#chart-ipfs-bitswap-unique-cids-ts
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The most active peer has made more than 4M requests, while the most popular CID has been requested 626 times, on April 26th - see last two tables at: https://probelab.io/ipfs/bitswap/
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IPNI has been very stable the last 1.5 months, with more than 99% uptime. It is also worth highlighting that delayed ingests (i.e., content that has not been indexed for more than 5 mins after advertisement) which happened for 5%-10% of requests earlier in the year, is now constantly close to 0%: https://probelab.io/ipfs/ipni/cid.contact/#chart-ipni-uptime-bar
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The IPNI Lookup Latency for uncached content at the p90 has almost tripled since the beginning of the year, but the rest of the percentiles for both cached and uncached content have remained at previous levels: https://probelab.io/ipfs/ipni/cid.contact/#chart-ipni-latencies-ts
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There’s a clear downward trend in the number of requests per day to the traditional IPFS Gateways. For a brief period of three days (13th to 16th of April) the number of badbits requests has also declined significantly from 25%-30% normally to less than 5%. The decline might be due to a shift towards the Service Worker Gateways: https://probelab.io/ipfs/gateways/#chart-ipfs-gateway-requests-ts
- At the same time, requests for cid.contact have ~doubled since end of last year: https://probelab.io/ipfs/ipni/cid.contact/#chart-ipfs-ipni-requests-ts
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In terms of the TTFB performance of Service Worker Gateways: https://probelab.io/ipfs/gateways/#chart-ipfs-service-worker-gateway-ttfb-ts
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There is a clear downward trend in the TTFB for cached content (cache hits) from all regions and for both Organic and Controlled CIDs.
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There is a spike in TTFB for uncached content (cache miss) for both Organic and Controlled CIDs from Europe and US East (interestingly). For the rest of the regions performance has remained stable.
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As usual, the density of PeerIDs across the DHT keyspace is below the risk threshold: https://probelab.io/ipfs/security/#chart-keyspace-regions-population
As always, feedback is welcome on this forum or the contact details of the ProbeLab team.