nanog mailing list archives

Re: IPv6 faster/better proof? was Re: Need /24 (arin) asap


From: Lee Howard <lee.howard () retevia net>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2018 07:46:31 -0400



On 06/11/2018 05:16 PM, Scott Weeks wrote:

--- cb.list6 () gmail com wrote:
From: Ca By <cb.list6 () gmail com>

Meanwhile, FB reports that 75% of mobiles in the USA
reach them via ipv6

And Akaimai reports 80% of mobiles
And they both report ipv6 is faster / better.
----------------------------------------
Let me grab a few more for you:

https://blogs.akamai.com/2016/06/preparing-for-ipv6-only-mobile-networks-why-and-how.html

https://blogs.akamai.com/2016/10/ipv6-at-akamai-edge-2016.html

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/28/ipv6_now_faster_a_fifth_of_the_time which cites an academic paper http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2959424.2959429 by Vaibhav Bajpai and Jürgen Schönwälder

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ipv6-measurements-zaid-ali-kahn/

https://community.infoblox.com/t5/IPv6-CoE-Blog/Can-IPv6-Rally-Be-Faster-than-IPv4-Part-1/ba-p/6419

https://www.nanog.org/meetings/abstract?id=2281

I'd sure like to see how they came up with these
numbers in a technically oriented paper.
Most of the above links explain how they got the numbers.
Facebook, in particular, did A/B testing using Mobile Proxygen, which is to say that they configured their mobile app to report performance over both IPv4 and IPv6 from the same handset at the same time. Others, including APNIC's https://stats.labs.apnic.net/v6perf have a browser fetch two objects with unique URLs, one from an IPv4-only server and one from an IPv6-only server, and compare them.



  There
should be no difference, except for no CGN or Happy
Eyeballs working better or something similar.  Am I
missing something?  Same routers; same links; same
RTTs; same interrupt times on servers; same etc, etc
for both protocols.

From time to time somebody says, "Okay, maybe it works in practice, but does it work in *theory*?"

Busy engineers hardly ever investigate things going inexplicably right.

My hypothesis is that the observed difference in performance relates to how mobile networks deploy their transition mechanisms. Those with a dual-stack APN take a native path for IPv6, while using a CGN path for IPv4, which, combined with the Happy Eyeballs head start, might add 501microseconds, which is a ms, which is 15% of 7ms. Those with an IPv6-only APN use a native path for IPv6, while using either a NAT64 for IPv4 (identical performance to CGN) or 464xlat, which requires translation both in the handset and the NAT64; handsets may not be optimized for header translation.

However, I have a dozen other hypotheses, and the few experiments I've been able to run have not confirmed any hypothesis. For instance, when one protocol is faster than another on a landline network, hop count is not a correlation (therefore, shorter paths, traffic engineering, etc., are not involved).

Lee


Hmm...  Faster and better?

The links seem to be an IPv6 cheerleader write up.
I looked at the URLs and the URLs one pointed to and
pulled out everything related to IPv6 being
faster/better.


Akamai URL:

"For dual-stacked hostnames we typically see higher
average estimated throughput over IPv6 than over IPv4.
Some of this may be due to IPv6-connected users being
correlated with better connectivity, but over half of
dual-stacked hostnames (weighted by daily bytes
delivered) have IPv6 estimated throughput at least 50%
faster than IPv4, and 90% of these hostnames have the
IPv6 estimated throughput at least 10% faster than
IPv4."



FB URL:

"People using Facebook services typically see better
performance over IPv6..."

and it points to
https://code.facebook.com/posts/1192894270727351/ipv6-it-s-time-to-get-on-board
which says:

"We’ve long been anticipating the exhaustion of IPv
in favor of the speed and performance benefits of
IPv6."

"We’ve observed that accessing Facebook can be 10-15
percent faster over IPv6."


I'd sure like to see how they came up with these
numbers in a technically oriented paper.  There
should be no difference, except for no CGN or Happy
Eyeballs working better or something similar.  Am I
missing something?  Same routers; same links; same
RTTs; same interrupt times on servers; same etc, etc
for both protocols.

scott


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