Hacker News Reader

Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

I still think IPv6 can be safely ignored.

This articles section "here are some reasons you should start using IPv6 within your own network" seems to comfirm this. None of the 6 "reasons" speak to me.

View on HN

Here's an easy one for you: if you have a gigabit connection, most home routers can barely handle the load of NAT. That's why gamers push for IPv6. It's mentioned in the article but few people realize how inefficient NAT can be at gigabit and more.

My ISP router could do max 800 mbps, which isn't so bad, but it degraded when we were multiple people using the link. With IPv6 it's much less of a problem, we can easily saturate the 1gbps without the router having a meltdown.

I don't even know what type of connection I have. I only know the speed is way more than I need.

fast.com says 50 "Mbps". Whatever that is.

You aren't qualified to speak on this topic. Sorry.

If NAT were an HN comment

> if you have a gigabit connection, most home routers can barely handle the load of NAT.

I remember reading about this as well. Wouldn't that also apply to stateful firewalling, though? Or is NAT inherently more computationally difficult (e.g. due to having to recompute IP and/or TCP/UDP checksums) than checking a state table?

> if you have a gigabit connection

Yeah, not anywhere close. In ten years I’ll have one maybe.

> if you have a gigabit connection

Rare in the US. Hell, we don't even have a 1Gb connection at work.

The consumer links are usually oversubscribed. In Prague, you can easily get 1Gbps if you're near fibre. However, office-quality link will cost you 10x more for the same nominal speed.

>Here's an easy one for you: if you have a gigabit connection, most home routers can barely handle the load of NAT.

[citation needed]

>That's why gamers push for IPv6.

[citation needed]

I have a symmetrical gig connection, ISP doesn't provide IPv6. Can route full line speed using their router, no matter if it's 1 device or 50 connected.

I don't know of a single game that supports IPv6, although some consoles might?

Yep, Xbox supports IPv6.

Maybe it's a ricer thing, but I definitely see a difference and I compared my ISP's router (which didn't display CPU load), an openwrt router without hw flow offloading support (horrible), and an UDM SE.

(I don't have an Xbox, I just see posts on my local ISP's forum)

> if you have a gigabit connection, most home routers can barely handle the load of NAT

We are on AT&T Fiber, the router has no issues. I've never seen a router have issues with any speed for that matter, where NAT is concerned.

> That's why gamers push for IPv6.

I'm a gamer, I know a lot of gamers, no one is pushing for IPv6 that I'm aware of.

Haha bollocks. NAT adds probably at most 1 microsecond to the processing of packets. It’s state for a flow is roughly 16 bytes. The nonsense about NAT being inefficient or slow astounds me.

> The results show that rewriting the packets is quite a bit more expensive than just allowing or dropping a packet. For example, if we look at the unidirectional test with 10,000 flows, we see that we dropped from 14M pps [packets per second] to 3.2M pps, we also needed 13 cores more to do this!

https://atoonk.medium.com/linux-kernel-and-measuring-network...

Just speculating, but I believe the cost comes from all the memory operations of reading/editing/writing every packet, not from the NAT table lookup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com