Low Power Mode

[jcgruenhage]

Type: Feature

Severity: Medium

Description:

IPFS on Android (with IPFSDroid) already works kinda well, but having the app running is currently not an option, because it sucks your battery empty in no time. Would it be possible, to implement an API call, that switches a node into low power (and possibly also into low bandwidth) mode, so that running this on mobile devices is more doable? Killing the node all the time would be another way, but that does kinda defeat the purpose of IPFS.

[Kubuxu]

First step would be probably running go-ipfs in DHT client mode:
ipfs daemon --routing=dhtclient

We are working on connection closing which should further reduce the number of connections thus reducing bandwidth and power usage.

[jcgruenhage]

Thanks :)

[whyrusleeping]

Yeah, as @Kubuxu pointed out you probably want to use --routing=dhtclient. Its probably also worth turning off the reprovider with: ipfs config Reprovider.Interval "0" so your node doesnt rebroadcast all this things it has every 12 hours.

[Stebalien]

Note: Bitswap sessions (#3786) will help reduce background traffic significantly.

[jbshirk]

Cross ref
https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/sweet-ipfs-full-ipfs-node-for-android/3779/16

[hazae41]

Sweet-IPFS 0.2.2 adds a "low power" mode by using this config

"Swarm": {
    "ConnMgr": {
      "LowWater": 20,
      "HighWater": 100,
      "GracePeriod": "80s"
    }
  }

[lidel]

lowpower profile was implemented a while ago. it is shutting down various things to decrease impact on battery:

kubo/config/profile.go

Lines 171 to 187 in 6f730dc

	"lowpower": {
	Description: `Reduces daemon overhead on the system. May affect node
	functionality - performance of content discovery and data
	fetching may be degraded.
	`,
	Transform: func(c *Config) error {
	c.Routing.Type = "dhtclient"
	c.AutoNAT.ServiceMode = AutoNATServiceDisabled
	c.Reprovider.Interval = "0"
	lowWater := int64(20)
	highWater := int64(40)
	gracePeriod := time.Minute
	c.Swarm.ConnMgr.Type = NewOptionalString("basic")
	c.Swarm.ConnMgr.LowWater = &OptionalInteger{value: &lowWater}
	c.Swarm.ConnMgr.HighWater = &OptionalInteger{value: &highWater}
	c.Swarm.ConnMgr.GracePeriod = &OptionalDuration{&gracePeriod}

Future work would be to default to a pool of gateways hosting blocks / CARs and starting up P2P/DHT only as a fallback, but that would be tracked in a separate issue.