[AfrIPv6-Discuss] Measuring the Effects of Happy Eyeballs

[Nishal Goburdhan]

Measuring the Effects of Happy Eyeballs:
http://vaibhavbajpai.com/documents/papers/proceedings/dualstack-he-anrw-2016.pdf

ABSTRACT
The IETF has developed protocols that promote a healthy IPv4 and IPv6 
co-existence. The Happy Eyeballs (HE) algorithm, for in- stance, 
prevents bad user experience in situations where IPv6 con- nectivity is 
broken. Using an active test (happy) that measures TCP connection 
establishment times, we evaluate the effects of the HE algorithm. The 
happy test measures against ALEXA top 10K websites from 80 SamKnows 
probes connected to dual-stacked net- works representing 58 different 
ASes. Using a 3-years long (2013 - 2016) dataset, we show that TCP 
connect times to popular websites over IPv6 have considerably improved 
over time. As of May 2016, 18% of these websites are faster over IPv6 
with 91% of the rest at most 1 ms slower. The historical trend shows 
that only around 1% of the TCP connect times over IPv6 were ever above 
the HE timer value (300 ms), which leaves around 2% chance for IPv4 to 
win a HE race towards these websites. As such, 99% of these websites 
prefer IPv6 connections more than 98% of the time. We show that although 
absolute TCP connect times (in ms) are not that far apart in both 
address families, HE with a 300 ms timer value tends to prefer slower 
IPv6 connections in around 90% of the cases. We show that lowering the 
HE timer value to 150 ms gives us a margin benefit of 10% while 
retaining same preference levels over IPv6.

and useful:
http://happy.vaibhavbajpai.com

—n.