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by davidkuennen 62 days ago
Setting up my own server (migrating off GCP LB) taught me so much about networking. I was especially surprised that providing IPv6 is such a performance boost for low bandwidth phones since they mostly only operate on IPv6 by now and IPv4 needs some sort of special roundtrip.
1 comments

Cool! Could you give some concrete examples of apps or traffic patterns where you think IPv6 may noticeably improve performance on phones? Are you mainly referring to NAT traversal during connection setup, or to something that also affects traffic after the connection is established?
Many mobile ISPs handle v4 via NAT64 or CGNAT. Routers capable of doing those are far more expensive than regular routers, so there tends to be fewer of them. v4 traffic has to travel out of its way to reach one of those routers, whereas v6 traffic can be handed off sooner with a more direct physical path.

It affects anything where latency matters, e.g. from Facebook: "We’ve observed that accessing Facebook can be 10-15 percent faster over IPv6." (https://engineering.fb.com/2015/09/14/networking-traffic/ipv...).