Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by StavrosK 2644 days ago
After being optimistic enough about IPFS to create a whole service around it (https://www.eternum.io), and mostly because of the service, I now have my doubts. Nodes can routinely not discover each other. I'll add a file to my node then request it from a gateway and it will take multiple minutes before the file is resolved. There's no information on how far along a pin is. The API for pinning things is atrocious (you need to keep the http request alive for the multiple days it might take to pin something). I have to resort to just retrying the pins over and over until they succeed.

I'm sure there's some information hidden somewhere if I shell out to the binary and parse the response well enough, but if a paid service required me to do this, I'd laugh and never touch them again. These days, whenever I see that something is "based on IPFS", I mentally translate it to "not working".
1 comments
feanaro 2643 days ago
> I'll add a file to my node then request it from a gateway and it will take multiple minutes before the file is resolved.

Sadly, I've noticed this myself. Have you reported these things to the IPFS developers?

> you need to keep the http request alive for the multiple days it might take to pin something

I didn't understand this part. You make the HTTP request towards your local IPFS daemon? Why does it take several days to pin something?

link
StavrosK 2643 days ago
Yes, I've reported everything, and they were extremely helpful (to the point where they debugged things with me), but nothing changed.

> Why does it take several days to pin something?

The daemon doesn't act like a torrent client, where you can add a pin and then come back later to check progress. You need to do an HTTP POST (or whatever verb) and then wait until it's done, which due to availability issues and size might take days to complete.

link
feanaro 2643 days ago
> Yes, I've reported everything, and they were extremely helpful (to the point where they debugged things with me), but nothing changed.

Do you remember how long ago this was? I'm still hoping this is a solvable problem since I really want IPFS to work.

> The daemon doesn't act like a torrent client, where you can add a pin and then come back later to check progress. You need to do an HTTP POST (or whatever verb) and then wait until it's done, which due to availability issues and size might take days to complete.

Oh. That does sound awful. I wonder why they designed it like that.

link
StavrosK 2643 days ago
> Do you remember how long ago this was? I'm still hoping this is a solvable problem since I really want IPFS to work.

This was around two years ago. I hope it'll get solved too, but it doesn't seem to have been solved yet.

> I wonder why they designed it like that.

I guess it was just easier, but they haven't done anything in years. The ticket has been open since 2016: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/3054

link
martindbp 2642 days ago
I recently looked into this, and now there at least seems to be a --progress option to 'pin add' which shows number of "nodes" fetched/processed (IPLD nodes?). Not sure how to put that into greater context though, i.e. how many nodes are there, and how does it translate into bytes? But it's better than nothing.
link
StavrosK 2642 days ago
Ah, I'll check to see if that's in the API, although it's not super helpful if I still need to keep the connection open. Still, as you say, better than nothing!
link