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Why does IPV6 slow things down so much? [solved]


ianw1974
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At home, never really had this problem until now, since my network doesn't broadcast IPV6.

 

However, when in work today, I was wondering why web browsing, etc, was running slow. I ran an ifconfig, and found an additional entry mentioning inet6. Running an ifconfig -a, gave me a sit0 device, which I kind of figured must be the only way I can tell that my system was using IPV6, along with the inet6 mentioned as well.

 

IPV6 is disabled in Firefox, did that ages ago.

 

I disabled with alias net-pf-10 off in modprobe.conf, and it's kind of a bit better at least, but wondered why it impacts the system so much? Any ideas much appreciated!!!

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I think this sums it up quite nicely. It is only one aspect though.

A short bit about IPv6 addresses:

 

IPv6 addresses are, compared to IPv4 addresses, really big: 128 bits against 32 bits. And this provides us just with the thing we need: many, many IP-addresses: 340,282,266,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,465 to be precise. Apart from this, IPv6 (or IPng, for IP Next Generation) is supposed to provide for smaller routing tables on the Internet's backbone routers, simpler configuration of equipment, better security at the IP level and better support for QoS.

 

An example: 2002:836b:9820:0000:0000:0000:836b:9886

(source can be found here)

 

Another aspect is that networks are currently using ipv4 as default, so the ipv6 sites that are already in use are "translated" into a ipv4 compatible form. This adds to the slowdown. Many network-gurus already claimed that ipv6 is probably useless and will never be necessary. (ipv6 was started out of fear that the available network adresses wouldn't be sufficient for the near future).

A third aspect is that some ipv6 servers are configured badly, causing memory leaks with websites, so that the memory size of pages appears to be much bigger than it really is. This can cause tremendous slowdowns and freezing networks (denial of service), forcing a reset of the machine or the router.

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Wow arctic.

Every one of your posts teaches me something more, in simple language, that a non-geek like me can understand. I love it .

Cheers mate.                      John.

 

I second that! :P

 

Many thanks for the info, it's help me understand a bit more how it all works and hangs together. I wasn't sure what was going on, but I think it all seems to be OK now I'm just using IPV4. What I did notice was that it was doing some sort of IPV6 --> IPV4, which is what your post mentioned above. So, now I've stopped that, I shouldn't (hopefully), get any further slow-down in speed.

 

Although I think yesterday, it was also contributed to by the fact that some internet sites were slow yesterday too. But mandrivausers.org was still nice and fast :D

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