Gaining visibility in IPFS systems

What this post added

This post introduces the IPFS Gateway monitor, an observability tool developed to measure the performance and reliability of IPFS gateways. It details the tool's architecture, including its three main components: `ipfs-gw-measure`, `ipfs-gw-monitor`, and a Prometheus Exporter. The post presents measurement results for various scenarios, including immutable IPFS content retrieval (cached, uncached, unavailable), mutable IPNS name resolution (newly created, existing, republished, cached, unavailable), and DNSLink website access (as hostname and path, for both IPFS and IPNS). Key findings highlight the significant performance benefits of caching IPFS content and the relative speed advantage of DNSLink over IPNS for naming resources. The tool and its findings are intended to inform future improvements to Cloudflare's IPFS gateway service and the broader IPFS ecosystem.