The IPFS network tends to run quickly if the file you are fetching is stored in the cache of either ipfs.io or in the cache of cloudflare. Everything else has lookup times of 30-60 seconds, sometimes more.
DHTs just aren't a good choice for massive data systems if you need low latency.
I think that's an unfair example because those files come pre-pinned or at least pre-loaded with most IPFS installs.
I've just pinned a 12MiB file filled with random bytes on one of my servers (`dd if=/dev/urandom of=test.dat bs=1M count=12; ipfs add test.dat; ipfs pin <hash that came out>`). The server has a 50mbps uplink, so transferring the file to my laptop should take about two seconds.
Dumping this blog's contents over IPFS takes the server about 3 seconds (first time load) so the network seems to be in working order, at least when downloading data. `ipfs swarm peers` lists about 800 known peers. On the server itself, `ipfs cat /ipfs/redacted > /tmp/test.dat` runs in about a second, which is all perfectly acceptable overhead for a transfer that'll take two to three seconds anyway.
On my laptop, I've tried to get the file but I just cancelled it after waiting for 16 minutes. Halfway throughout the wait, I've tried opening the file through the ipfs.io proxy, which finally gave me the file after a few minutes, but no such luck yet if I retry the ipfs command.
I don't know if it's the random file, the size, or something different, but if I'm launching a blog or publishing documents on IPFS, visitors should not be expected to wait five to ten minutes for the data to load. "After the first twenty visitors it'll get faster" is not a solution to this problem, because there won't be twenty visitors to help the network cache my content.
Maybe I'm expecting too much here; maybe the files shouldn't be expected to be available within half an hour, or before Cloudflare caches it. Maybe there's something wrong with my laptop's setup (I haven't done any port forwarding and I'm behind a firewall). Either way, if I follow the manual but can still buy a domain, set up DNS and hosting on my VPS and send a link to a friend faster than I can get the file through P2P, I don't think IPFS will ever get off the ground. Fifteen minutes is an awful lot of time for a data transfer these days!
Edit: actually, now it seems ipfs.io and cloudflare have picked up the file in their caches. Data transfer is up to normal speed now. If you want to try to replicate my experiment, I've just uploaded a new test file to /ipfs/QmbBD872kjfoutAmTKFCxTCApw9LBB9qxxRyXpEGYzsqMH.
Edit 2: I realized that by saying I downloaded the file and that the file is random, I just announced my personal IP address to the world through the IPFS hash, so I removed it. That was pretty dumb of me, and also a pretty clear problem of IPFS in my book.
