Performance Evaluation of IPFS in Private Networks

Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that has gained a wide interest recently. The IPFS network is public and its content can be accessed by any user in the Internet. IPFS can also be used as a file sharing system in an isolated private network. However, it has notable writing and reading performance drawbacks. The aim of this study is to evaluate the performance of IPFS writing and reading operations in private networks and to understand what factors affect it. In our performance evaluation approach, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is selected as the baseline measurement, a virtual network of three nodes (machines) is established, and nine random files with different sizes are transmitted among the network members, using both IPFS and FTP, while the latency and CPU time, as performance metrics, are recorded and analyzed. The analysis shows that IPFS writing and reading performance is much worser than FTP, the reading operations latency is getting worser as the file size increases, IPFS writing and reading performance bottleneck is in the local I/O disk operations, which increase as the number of the file data blocks increases (i.e. the file size increases), and the reading performance of IPFS degrades as the data become more popular in the network. The performance evaluation illustrates that using IPFS in private networks is not as good as using the client-server alternatives, and IPFS needs more improvements to compete with the existing client-server file sharing technologies.