fifonetworks, 9 months ago to random

Which is faster – IPv4 or IPv6?

One of the early arguments used to encourage organizations to switch to IPv6 was that it’s faster. It’s true – it is intrinsically faster – but the real world being what it is, there are times when you’ll see better performance with IPv4.

I wrote a simple batch file that runs on Windows machines, and I’ve used it at various times around the country and with different ISPs. The results have been interesting. Sometimes IPv4 is faster (as measured by latency of echo replies), sometimes IPv6 is faster, and sometimes the latency is about the same.

Here’s the text of the batch file, so you can create the script locally, run it, and check your results.

---

@echo off
title IPv4 and IPv6 Latency Test ver 2.3
color 0a

echo IPv6 Latency Test... please wait
echo IPv6 Latency Test Results: > %userprofile%\documents\ipv4_ipv6_test.txt
ping yahoo(.)com -n 10 >> %userprofile%\documents\ipv4_ipv6_test.txt
echo.
echo IPv4 Latency Test... please wait
echo IPv4 Latency Test Results: >> %userprofile%\documents\ipv4_ipv6_test.txt
ping -4 yahoo(.)com -n 10 >> %userprofile%\documents\ipv4_ipv6_test.txt
echo.
color a0
echo Done! Results are stored in %userprofile%\documents\ipv4_ipv6_test.txt
echo.
start notepad %userprofile%\documents\ipv4_ipv6_test.txt
pause

---

Note 1: You’ll need to remove the parentheses in yahoo(.)com in both ping commands for the script to run correctly.

Note 2: I chose Yahoo for this test because, at this writing, Yahoo allows ping to work on their webservers. If you decide to use a different site, be aware that ping won’t work with some sites. For example, Microsoft disables ICMP on their web interfaces.

If you decide to experiment, I’d love to know what results you get.

#weekend #entertainment #boredITnerds