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How a request reaches you

  1. Discovery. Every node publishes a DHT record for each blob it caches. A client or node looking for a hash finds the holders through the DHT. The bonded set itself comes from the on-chain registry.
  2. Probing. The requester probes candidates in parallel. Each probe response confirms availability, measures round-trip time and carries your signed per-MB rate.
  3. Selection.
    • Clients rank candidates by measured round-trip time only. The closest responsive node wins, as long as its rate is under the client’s ceiling.
    • Nodes filling a cache miss rank holders by a combined score of price, latency and their local reputation of each holder. They collect probe answers for up to 500 ms, and stop early once enough viable holders answer.
The region you declare does not partition the network. A client uses regions only to shortlist which nodes to probe, then picks on measured latency. A region claim that latency contradicts costs the node reputation. See Network topology.

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Regional warming

A first node in a new region starts with an empty cache. Regional proxy warming fills it from real demand:
  1. A client finds that every holder of a blob is far away, and that a bonded node it can reach is much closer.
  2. The client sends its paid request through that nearby node, even though the node does not hold the blob.
  3. The nearby node pulls the blob from a distant holder, streams it to the client as it arrives, and keeps the copy.
  4. It announces the copy in the DHT. Later requests from the region go to it directly, because it answers fastest.
Warming needs a cache-only node with pull-through turned on and a funded buyer pool, because the node pays the distant holder for the pull. It is on by default in clients. See ADR 037.

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What to expect on testnet

Testnet traffic is real client demand, mostly model downloads, and today most clients are in North America and Europe. There is no synthetic traffic. A node in a region with few clients sees modest volume at first, and that volume is an honest measure of local demand. Volume grows with the clients near you, and a node that is the first in its region is the one that warms up when they arrive.