Subject: RE: IPv6 traffic stats (was: Re: Last Call: draft-irtf-asrg-dnsbl (DNS Blacklists and Whitelists))

From: Joe St Sauver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:12:53 -0800

David mentioned:

#For the record: 
#
#It seems that arbornetworks estimates are extremely low to the point
#where one has to ask whether there were other issues that caused such
#a low estimate.
#
#There is no question that IPv6 traffic is quite low in the Internet.
#However, many other reports that I have seen recently measure multiple
#orders of magnitude more IPv6 traffic (for an easily accesible example
#see: http://www.ams-ix.net/technical/stats/sflow/)

The Ether Type graph on the AMS-IX page indicates that IPv6 is on average 
1/10th of 1% all the traffic they measure, and looking at the associated 
RRDtool graphs, that works out to be ~800Mbits/second.

A sustained ~800 Mbits/second is certainly nothing to sneeze at, and
everyone who has worked hard to encourage IPv6 deployment deserves many
kudos. Progress is happening!

On the other hand, just to put this in context and to pick on an 
application I'm somewhat familiar with, a single full-ish Usenet news 
feed is now in excess of 3TByte/day (see the daily volume stats quoted 
at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet ). Just two or three full-ish
Usenet News feeds over IPv6, if done across AMS-IX, would account 
for most of that 800Mbps traffic load (assuming that Usenet is what
was making up most of that traffic, an assertion that I'm explictly
NOT making). My point? It is possible that the IP transport choices
of just a few cooperating server administrators might (at least
hypothetically) account for virtually all the observed growth in 
AMS-IX IPv6 traffic. 

As to why the AMS-IX number might differ from Arbor's statistic, we 
know that traffic at exchange points may have a dramatically different 
composition than traffic measured elsewhere, due in part to the 
economics of that environment. 

E.g., continuing to pick on poor old Usenet, people may be willing to 
exchange Usenet feeds across a settlement-free peering point while 
they might NOT be willing to exchange Usenet feeds that required 
(comparatively expensive) transit bandwidth. Those sort of economic 
choices mean that it is risky to extrapolate Internet-wide traffic 
statistics from the somewhat atypical settlement-free peering 
environment.

But what sort of growth pattern do we actually see at 
http://www.ams-ix.net/technical/stats/sflow/ ?

That graph *isn't* growing in the characteristic "stair step" pattern 
one might expect if you were to suddenly flopping full news feeds over 
onto IPv6. The growth we see there is much more consistent with what you 
might find from growth in end user traffic (which could be dominated by 
web, or P2P, or flash videos or scientists ftp'ing large data sets, or
yes, even email, who knows, since there's no way to definitively know 
w/o doing deep packet inspection, which I doubt would be possible in 
this case). 

So to bring this post to a close, I continue to believe that IPv6
traffic, at least IPv6 email traffic, remains very, very low, to 
the point where, as I've previous mentioned, it just hasn't justified
DNS block list operator attention in any material way (love to hear
about any counter examples, BTW).

Regards,

Joe St Sauver ([email-masked])
http://www.uoregon.edu/~joe/
Disclaimer: all opinions strictly my own. 
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From: David Kessens <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:28:25 -0800

Joe,

> hypothetically) account for virtually all the observed growth in 

Very good analysis: rumor has it that a large part of the AMS-IX
traffic is indeed usenet traffic. However, that doesn't mean that it
is not real IPv6 traffic: eg. we don't decide not to count IPv4 Usenet
traffic either. On the other hand, this graph only shows native
traffic so there is most likely more than what is visible in the
graph.

However, there are quite a few other observations by others (also
mentioned on this list) that put the total amount of IPv6 traffic to
various other parts of the Internet at a bit more but in the same
order of magnitude so it doesn't seem that the AMS-IX data is out of
line (various presentations on this topic from the last RIPE
meeting are available on rosie.ripe.net, look for ipv6 working group
or plenary).

> about any counter examples, BTW).

This of course depends a bit on what you define as very, very low.
However, I can certainly see that it is not enough to get the
attention of a DNS block list operator. I do do know however, that I
received my first spam mail over IPv6 several years ago.

The reason for my mail was not to disproof your point but to put the
arbornetworks numbers in a bit more perspective.

David Kessens
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From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 07:15:02 -0800

Who cares about the use measurement?
 
I care about the proportion of the Internet where I can obtain acceptable service with full functionality via an IPv6-only endpoint connection.

________________________________

From: [email-masked] on behalf of David Kessens
Sent: Wed 11/12/2008 4:28 PM
To: Joe St Sauver
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: IPv6 traffic stats (was: Re: Last Call: draft-irtf-asrg-dnsbl(DNS Blacklists and Whitelists))

Joe,

David Kessens
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