DHT Lookup Latency Increase since mid-June 2023

[yiannisbot]

Context

We've been observing a slight increase in the DHT Lookup Latency since around the mid of June 2023. The increase is in the order of ~10% and is captured in our measurement plots at: https://probelab.io/ipfskpi/#dht-lookup-performance-long-plot. This is a tracking issue to identify the cause of the latency increase.

Evidence

Below the short-term latency graph (https://probelab.io/ipfsdht/#dht-lookup-performance-overall-plot):

Observing the CDFs of the DHT Lookup latency across different regions over time, we see a clear move towards the right of the plot for several regions, most notably for eu-central, but also ap-south-1 and also af-south-1 (in Week 27).

Week 24 (2023-06-12/18)
https://github.com/plprobelab/network-measurements/tree/master/reports/2023/calendar-week-24/ipfs#dht-performance

Week 25 (2023-06-19-25)
https://github.com/plprobelab/network-measurements/tree/master/reports/2023/calendar-week-25/ipfs#dht-performance

Week 26 (2023-06-26 - 2023-07-02)
https://github.com/plprobelab/network-measurements/tree/master/reports/2023/calendar-week-26/ipfs#dht-performance

Week 27 (2023-07-03/09)
https://github.com/plprobelab/network-measurements/tree/master/reports/2023/calendar-week-27/ipfs#dht-performance

Thoughts

The latency seems to be heading back down, but we're not sure if there's a specific reason for this behaviour. Some thoughts:

• The latency bump seems to coincide with kubo-v0.21.0-rc1 and later releases at the end of June: https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/releases/tag/v0.21.0-rc1. There doesn't seem to be something that could affect performance there, other than "Saving previously seen nodes for later bootstrapping" (https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/blob/release-v0.21.0/docs/changelogs/v0.21.md#saving-previously-seen-nodes-for-later-bootstrapping), but even in this case, the original bootstrappers are not removed.
• The latency bump also comes about a month later than the Boxo release at kubo-v0.20.0: https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/releases#boxo-under-the-covers. Not sure if something in there could affect performance (?)
• The majority of nodes still use kubo-v0.18 as per: https://probelab.io/ipfsdht/#kubo-version-distribution, but there are about 3.5k nodes in v0.20.0 and v0.21.0, which could be enough in order to cause this slight increase.
• At the same time, we're observing a decrease in the number of available DHT server nodes in the EU region (https://probelab.io/ipfsdht/#dht-availability-classified-region-plot - not sure if we can find historical data for this @iand @dennis-tra ?), which could impact performance from our eu-central node.

Any other thoughts @Jorropo @aschmahmann @lidel @hacdias ?

[yiannisbot]

The DHT Lookup Latency seems to have gone down and although I'm not terribly proud that we didn't have time look into this in more detail, I'll close this issue, as it doesn't seem like an alarming case.

One observation though which might explain the situation is that DHT Lookup Latency seems to be going up when we have lots of peers that show as "Offline" at: https://probelab.io/ipfsdht/#dht-availability-classified-overall-plot (related issue: #57).

Putting the plots side by side, we see that when we have lots of peers that appear offline (seen for less than 10% of the time), latency goes up (red rectangles), while the opposite happens when the number of offline peers goes down (green rectangle).

As discussed in: #57 this is an issue worth looking into in more detail.