42 ms·

A lot of mobile phones access the internet via IPv6 by default, and IPv4-only sites that want to reach them require non-trivial compatibility infrastructure lik

A lot of mobile phones access the internet via IPv6 by default, and IPv4-only sites that want to reach them require non-trivial compatibility infrastructure like carrier-grade NAT or more complicated shenanigans. It seems like some sites are starting to identify these shims as a huge stumbling block in their continuous work to improve latency/quality-of-service. I think Facebook in particular made a bunch of noise in that direction and celebrates how prioritizing IPv6 has let them make huge improvements in load times etc, but at this point you're as likely to find good information about that on Google as I am so I'll spare you any links. So while IPv6 might not have taken over the Internet in any particularly observable manner so far, I think it's fair to say it has huge momentum at this point and has buy-in way beyond some IETF nerds and protocol fetishists.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
> It seems like some sites are starting to identify these shims as a huge stumbling block in their continuous work to improve latency/quality-of-service. I'd be curious to know how much time you can actually save because really, honestly, in the case of Facebook this particular aspect should be the last of their concerns as far as page load times are concerned.
- zlynx 8y ago
  Hundreds of milliseconds per TCP (or UDP) session. The CGNAT boxes are handling hundreds of thousands of flows. And they're part of failover clusters so each flow has to be shipped to the other cluster members and acknowledged before starting the flow. And these things are often overloaded and adding tens of milliseconds delay to each packet passing through. Because whoever heard of an ISP spending more than "just enough" on hardware?
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    You see, my point is that these milliseconds are negligible in the case of a website like Facebook that takes 20 second to fully load on a reasonably modern machine.
    - zlynx 8y ago
      You may already be behind an overloaded CGNAT then. Over IPv6 on Comcast cable, with the Edge browser, Facebook is fully loaded for me in 3 seconds. Surface tablet in power-save mode so this isn't some overpowered desktop monster.
      - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
        That's very interesting. I've just measured it in private mode, all plugins off, from the moment of clicking login till the time the page load indicator stopped running. 13 full seconds.
        zlynx 8y ago
        For fairness I just did that myself. 4 seconds.
    - ben0x539 8y ago
      I mean, we're probably not talking about a dozen milliseconds out of 20 seconds total, we're talking about extra milliseconds for every request or roundtrip or w/e constituting those 20 seconds. It's an extra cost that scales with the bloat you're decrying, it doesn't become insignificant next to it!
      - zlynx 8y ago
        Indeed. When I use Firefox dev tools to open Facebook I see over 300 requests. 300! Many of those are loaded over the same HTTP/2 connection. And a lot of those are cached. But that's still a lot of TCP connections to multiple servers opening up and every bit of added latency slows it all down.

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago

> It seems like some sites are starting to identify these shims as a huge stumbling block in their continuous work to improve latency/quality-of-service. I'd be curious to know how much time you can actually save because really, honestly, in the case of Facebook this particular aspect should be the last of their concerns as far as page load times are concerned.

zlynx 8y ago
Hundreds of milliseconds per TCP (or UDP) session. The CGNAT boxes are handling hundreds of thousands of flows. And they're part of failover clusters so each flow has to be shipped to the other cluster members and acknowledged before starting the flow. And these things are often overloaded and adding tens of milliseconds delay to each packet passing through. Because whoever heard of an ISP spending more than "just enough" on hardware?
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  You see, my point is that these milliseconds are negligible in the case of a website like Facebook that takes 20 second to fully load on a reasonably modern machine.
  - zlynx 8y ago
    You may already be behind an overloaded CGNAT then. Over IPv6 on Comcast cable, with the Edge browser, Facebook is fully loaded for me in 3 seconds. Surface tablet in power-save mode so this isn't some overpowered desktop monster.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      That's very interesting. I've just measured it in private mode, all plugins off, from the moment of clicking login till the time the page load indicator stopped running. 13 full seconds.
      - zlynx 8y ago
        For fairness I just did that myself. 4 seconds.
  - ben0x539 8y ago
    I mean, we're probably not talking about a dozen milliseconds out of 20 seconds total, we're talking about extra milliseconds for every request or roundtrip or w/e constituting those 20 seconds. It's an extra cost that scales with the bloat you're decrying, it doesn't become insignificant next to it!
    - zlynx 8y ago
      Indeed. When I use Firefox dev tools to open Facebook I see over 300 requests. 300! Many of those are loaded over the same HTTP/2 connection. And a lot of those are cached. But that's still a lot of TCP connections to multiple servers opening up and every bit of added latency slows it all down.