The FreeBSD Foundation posted this week about the completion of a “IPv6 Performance Analysis Project” that had as its main goal closing the gap between IPv4 and IPv6 in terms of performance.
Bjoern Zeeb was awarded a grant to perform this work earlier this year and has maintained a “Benchmarking and results” page showing his work and progress. As noted in the article:
With IPv6, TCP performance is now basically on par with IPv4 in the offloading case, allowing 10 Gbps line speed connections. This is a huge step forward. UDP throughput has increased and is closer to the level of IPv4. Changes to locking allowing better parallelism, which is a step in the right direction.
In the FreeBSD Foundation report, Zeeb is quoted as saying “This will help to keep the resource usage at the same level as traffic patterns shift towards IPv6.” This is indeed a concern. As more traffic shifts to IPv6, particularly with the impending World IPv6 Launch on June 6, 2012, network administrators will want to see the same level of performance in their servers on IPv6 as there is in IPv4.
Kudos to the FreeBSD team for recognizing this issue and undertaking the work – and congrats to Bjoern Zeeb and any others involved on bringing about performance parity in FreeBSD between IPv6 and IPv4. Great news to hear!