Examining IPv6 Performance

https://labs.ripe.net/Members/gih/examining-ipv6-performance

by tdurden • 11 years ago

74 77 11 years ago

labs.ripe.net

baq• 11 years ago

slightly OT: why is HN not ipv6 yet? why isn't reddit? why pretty much anyone except google and facebook isn't?

the_mitsuhiko17• 11 years ago

Because there is no benefit to running IPV6 if you have access to an IPV4 address.

eeZi4• 11 years ago

There actually is. An increasing number of ISPs is going IPv6-only with central carrier-grade NAT for IPv4. Those gateways are often overloaded, resulting in vastly better performance over IPv6.

scurvy10• 11 years ago

NAT v4 addresses are no fun. IPv6 addressing is a big win there. Especially in the mobile space.

scurvy10• 11 years ago

Facebook says that IPv6 is faster and clients stay on their site longer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfjdOc41g0s

rgbrenner• 11 years ago

isnt reddit pretty heavily invested in aws? aws doesn't support ipv6. nor does google compute.

nandhp• 11 years ago

reddit uses Cloudflare now, so this isn't as big of an issue as it used to be. Some relevant links:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2ftv08/hell_its_about... - https://www.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/3cfqrw/cloudflare_sup...

darkr• 11 years ago

ELBs are dual-stack v4/v6 by default.

That's about it though for IPv6 support on AWS. Annoyingly, Route53 supports AAAA records but their nameservers are only reachable via IPv4.

scurvy10• 11 years ago

Complete guess here, but their analytics, fraud, spam, etc systems are IP based and don't work well with the v6 address space yet?

Cloudflare handles their front end, so it should be as easy as toggling an option in the CF admin page.

tajen• 11 years ago

Here's the other side of the story: Not a sysadmin, but I'm an independent programmer with an online app. I've set up a Debian vps at OVH with IPv6 and it was unbearably slow. I used to believe it was OVH, but the reason seems to be that most things e.g. package managers wait for the request in IPv6 (or the one to the DNS) timeout before trying IPv4. An apt-get upgrade takes hours. I guess there's some kind of configuration to improve that, but when step 0 of setting up IPv6 starts with problems, I just stick to stacks that I can manage.

the_mitsuhiko17• 11 years ago

The problem there is probably the DNS resolution. I like the way apple does it: they resolve AAAA and A in parallel. Whatever comes back first is being used for the connection attempt. Much better than waiting for a ~5 second timeout on AAAA before calling back to A.

voltagex_4• 11 years ago

I've also noticed this. My home ISP (Internode, RIP) provides an IPv6 range. I dutifully set up AAAA records for a couple of my servers and then ended up disabling them either on the client or server side as things as simple as SSH were timing out. I don't think it was DNS, I'm fairly sure there was an MTU issue but I didn't dig into it that much.

SFjulie1• 11 years ago

because some customers of "internet" like me in northern america have an IPv4 only access to the internet.

Thanks to teksavvy that blames videotron. Customer services says: not a problem.

There is a growing balkanisation between highly dense zone with the critical mass for getting a ROI in IPv6 transition and less dense zone that where equiped with a correct IPv4 backbone.

Non mobile land connection is getting less and less connected to the internet, because "mobile" is the future. But mobile data plan and hardware are freakingly expensive as if there was a money divide on the internet between riches and poors. I don't want no smartphone, no mobile connection, no netflix: I just want a 1Megabyte/s clean internet with 100% internet connection.

It is really the IPv6pocalypse here. Half baked technologies put on the front, while the basics (100% access, UDP not dropping too much, not too much lags) are decaying (as if equipments where not upgraded).

I used to be a QIII player. Nowadays it is excessive lags, spikes everywhere on every continent. My internet sux balls big, QIII was a good reason to have internet. Now, everyone is happy with buggy crashy games that are sloooooowwww in gameplay but with a 4KHD 120fps.

Why must I have internet? Because administrative tasks requires me to have it to gather and send forms. Else, I would drop it.

2.8% of mondial energy burnt...for this

daveguy2• 11 years ago

This compares ipv6 vs ipv4 dual stacks between the same endpoints. The conclusion is that performance is equivalent but the establishment of the connection has a 9x higher failure rate for ipv6.

(Edits:grammar)

theophrastus• 11 years ago

Not a performance issue per-se, but more an ugly unintended consequence of IPv6 issues: peer-flooding in torrent transfers. I use libtorrent to distribute my data sets and i'm seeing all the usual trackers are being flooded (DoS-like) via the vast available, in this case phony, IPv6 address space[1]. The unstated contention by agents of content owners being that bit-torrent can never do anything but wrong. Selfishly focused on their own content they're statistically not utterly wrong, but they are using the design of IPv6 to poison the well for benevolent use.

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/popular-torrents-being-sabotaged-by...

voltagex_4• 11 years ago

Update: The IPv6 addresses which are used appear to be fictional. They haven’t been allocated yet and are non-routable.

What kind of network are they using that lets them send forged source addresses? Also, a temporary solution in that case would be to use a blocklist of non-allocated ranges.

the_mitsuhiko17• 11 years ago

BT is UDP and you can write whatever you want into a packet.

feld• 11 years ago

BCP38 is what you want everyone to implement

http://bcp38.org

jrcii• 11 years ago

I didn't RTFA but would point out that the performance problems I've run into with IPv6 aren't related to the specification itself but buggy implementation code from vendors, which I expect to improve with time.

shorttime• 11 years ago

Most definitely the case with at least Windows 8. Since I upgraded to Windows 10 I haven't experienced the problem. With Windows 8, after an uncertain period of time every app (browsers, torrents, games) would stall. It would drive me nuts until I found a post that recommended disabling the IPv6 networking protocol. It seemed to work fine until Windows 10 came along and all is good. Other devices on the network using Windows 7, android OS, didn't have any connectivity issues when the Windows 8 device did, so I'm sure it had to be Windows 8.

stock_toaster3• 11 years ago

There are also issues with end user rollouts. For example, comcast uses prefix delegation to give you are /60 which your router (pfsense in my case) then uses for the internet network (it carves out a /64). However, this prefix changes! As it is not a statically assigned prefix, my internal devices renumber whenever it changes, it would make it a huge pain to get a consistent mapping for my internal devices (media server, printer, etc) were I to go ipv6 only.

I thought about using an additional ULA subnet (ipv6 supports multiple subnets), but apparently many vendors do not yet support RFC 6724, or support it poorly with regard to ULA addresses. As such, I get mixed results with devices trying to use the ULA address for internet egress.

NAT66 (npt) is another possibility, and some people end up having to use this when they have more than one ISP (multi-wan balancing) anyway, but I haven't found a good way to update the nat target when the prefix changes yet (might try moving to openbsd and try ifstated calling a script to a pf table or something).

lmm3• 11 years ago

For example, comcast uses prefix delegation to give you are /60 which your router (pfsense in my case) then uses for the internet network (it carves out a /64). However, this prefix changes! As it is not a statically assigned prefix, my internal devices renumber whenever it changes, it would make it a huge pain to get a consistent mapping for my internal devices (media server, printer, etc) were I to go ipv6 only.

Part of the point of IPv6 is that your addresses reflect the real network topology - when your upstream changes, your addresses change. The right thing is to ensure that your router is also updating DNS for your internal devices, and use names to refer to them. You shouldn't expect anything to have a truly static IPv6 address.

edwintorok• 11 years ago

GeoIP routing is sometimes worse with native IPv6 than IPv4. Take gstatic.com for example which goes to a neighbouring country with IPv6 (inside same ISP, but still):

  $ ping -c 3 gstatic.com
  PING gstatic.com (82.77.159.222) 56(84) bytes of data.
  64 bytes from cache.google.com (82.77.159.222): icmp_seq=1 ttl=61 time=2.11 ms
  64 bytes from cache.google.com (82.77.159.222): icmp_seq=2 ttl=61 time=1.98 ms
  64 bytes from cache.google.com (82.77.159.222): icmp_seq=3 ttl=61 time=1.78 ms

  --- gstatic.com ping statistics ---
  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2002ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.780/1.960/2.118/0.143 m

  $ ping6 -c 3 gstatic.com
  PING gstatic.com(bud02s22-in-x03.1e100.net) 56 data bytes
  64 bytes from bud02s22-in-x03.1e100.net: icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 time=9.85 ms
  64 bytes from bud02s22-in-x03.1e100.net: icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 time=9.67 ms
  64 bytes from bud02s22-in-x03.1e100.net: icmp_seq=3 ttl=55 time=10.5 ms

  --- gstatic.com ping statistics ---
  3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 2003ms
  rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 9.675/10.031/10.568/0.403 ms

So I have this in /etc/gai.conf now:

  precedence ::ffff:0:0/96  100

scurvy10• 11 years ago

The worst problem with Google's GeoIP implementation is that you really can't report problems to them in a good manner. They have this: https://support.google.com/websearch/contact/ip but it only works for Google.com and not YouTube. I really, really wish Google would put more resources on this.

secure• 11 years ago

I heard that you can report YouTube connection issues at https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube, and YouTubers will address them. Have you tried that?

jvolkman• 11 years ago

I've gotta say, I was impressed with how easy the IPv6 setup was with the latest version of OpenWRT. I just recently upgraded and, with Comcast's native IPv6 support, everything just worked and all of the machines on my LAN grabbed externally-routable addresses. After poking some holes in the default firewall rules, I can connect directly from my machine at work (also IPv6 addressed) to a machine at home without any port mapping or translation. Feels nice.

onethumb• 11 years ago

Particularly on mobile, Facebook is seeing fairly big wins with IPv6. It's not entirely clear why, but it's happening. Here's Paul Saab's deck from earlier this year: https://www.dropbox.com/s/15xi92296lw32hu/Facebook-World-IPv...

eeZi4• 11 years ago

I bet on NAT latency. No NAT must be great for push messaging, since the network is stateless and less keepalives are necessary to keep the connection open.

Examining IPv6 Performance

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