Abstract: Churn is one of the main problems restricting the development and deployment of Distributed Hash Table networks. In terms of churn treatment, this paper researches the quick start-up bootstrapping mechanism of Kademlia and proposes a heuristic bootstrapping algorithm to overcome the defects of the original. By changing the way how to populate the routing tables, the heuristic algorithm decreases the messages sent by the joining nodes. Theoretical analysis and simulation result show that this algorithm can reduce the cost incurred by node joining and boost the systems capability of recovering from churn.