Subject: (IPng 6809) Re: ipng perf

From: Marc Fiuczynski <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 11:46:53 -0800

Hi,

I have made a few measurements between a pair of W/NT4.0 machines using
IPv4 and IPv6 (the IPv6 stack is from Microsoft Research).  These
measurements were done back in April 1998, in the context of my
IPv6/IPv4 Network Address and Protocol Translator work (published in
1998 USENIX).

The performance measurements are available from the following URL
http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/networking/napt/ and then click on
the "Applications & Benchmarks" link.  Note that my IPv6 measurements
are for an earlier version of the MSRIPv6 stack.  The performance of the
MSRIPv6 stack has significantly improved.  Richard Draves et. al. 1998
USENIX/NT paper provides more measurements.  A version of their paper is
available from
http://www.research.microsoft.com/msripv6/usenixnt/paper.htm.  Take a
look in the performance section of the paper (section 6). 

Note that in my measurements I achieve better performance than reported
in Richard Draves paper for IPv4 and IPv6 numbers on Ethernet, and for
IPv4 onfast Ethernet.  My belief is that the performance difference is
mostly due to using different Ethernet NICs (I used 3COM 3c905 and they
use SMC NICs) and drivers.  In fact, for my experiments, using an older
version of the 3COM driver achieves nearly 500Kbytes/sec better
throughput on fast Ethernet W/NT4.0 than reported on my webpage.
Consequently, the roughly 2% performance difference that one might
expect to see due to IPv6 protocol overhead is just in the noise!!!  It
is much more important to get finely tuned drivers and networking
hardware than worry about the small performance impact that IPv6
protocol overhead may introduce.

Marc

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