Hurricane Electric IPv6 Tunnel Throughput

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Evening all, I've been using OpenWrt for some time now with a Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel terminating on my WRT32X (and before that on an old Apple Airport Extreme). I'm generally very happy with the he.net service (except from Netflix breaking with it, but that's not HE's fault :man_shrugging:t2:).

I've been setting up a network of Plex Media Servers with some friends recently and wanted to enable them to run over IPv6, as most of us have it either natively or tunnelled where we host our servers. However, after finally getting it all working (AAAA records and firewall holes where the common issues) I'm finding that streaming video over the tunnel is performing very poorly compared to using IPv4 over the same network connection (in my case a Virgin Media 200Mb/s cable modem). I'm aware of the inefficiencies of encapsulating one network stream in another and fragmentation, but my streams seem to be maxing out at about 15Mb/s via the tunnel, compared to 25-35Mb/s on the IPv4 connection. FWIW the router's CPU isn't breaking a sweat.

What are you folks' experience of the throughput one can expect with a 6-in-4 tunnel in general and Hurricane Electric's service specifically?

2

I get line speed...my line is only ~60 Mbps, though.

It helps that my HE endpoint is in the same Internet Exchange as most IPv4 ISPs regional aggregate routers in my area (and my ISP peers with HE). I verified by doing tracerouting to all available endpoints offered at the time.

1 Like
3

HE obviously splits this bandwidth among all their tunnel clients, so it will depend on traffic congestion how much bw you get

3 Likes
4

I have a HE tunnel, on top of a symmetric 100mbps connection, and the throughput on the IPv6 channel is always higher than 95% of the throughput on the IPv4 channel.

1 Like
5

Thanks for the replies guys. Talking to some colleagues at work who also use HE, we reckon it could be down to my ISP (Virgin Media in the UK) stream throttling (I see the same behaviour with VPN and scp sessions from work to home). Multiple streams over IPv6 get much higher aggregate throughput.

FWIW my tunnel terminates in their LINX LON1 peering location (LON1 and LON2 are both 9 hops away from me).

6

As an aside, it would appear that Virgin Media are speeding up deployment of their native IPv6 service: https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/QuickStart-set-up-and/IPv6-support-on-Virgin-media/td-p/35748/page/74

Sadly, that thread also suggests that the deployment of IPv6 may also involve withdrawal of the CPE "modem mode". This is will upset a lot of OpenWrt users :flushed::grimacing:

7

This topic was automatically closed 10 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.