Peering with content providers

IPFS allows you to fetch data from providers using CIDs. This process usually involves a content routing lookup to find providers for the CID in the DHT and IPNI.

If you're running an IPFS node that serves many requests, such as a public HTTP gateway, you may be able to speed up queries by maintaining long-lived connections to nodes that provide many CIDs.

Prioritizing connections to certain peers is called Peering, and you can tell IPFS which peers to prioritize by editing the Peering configuration (opens new window) in your Kubo config file (opens new window).

To peer with nodes from Cloudflare, for example, update your config to include a Peering section like this:

{
  "Peering": {
    "Peers": [
      {
        "ID": "QmcfgsJsMtx6qJb74akCw1M24X1zFwgGo11h1cuhwQjtJP",
        "Addrs": ["/dnsaddr/node-8.ingress.cloudflare-ipfs.com"]
      }
    ]
  }
}

TIP

Generally speaking, users running IPFS at home won't need to set up peering and can ignore this page!

Peering is most helpful for nodes that have a lot of concurrent connections since it prevents the connection manager (opens new window) from dropping connections it thinks aren't "useful" any longer. If you find yourself running near the connection manager's limit, you may benefit from peering with content providers.