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A comment on 98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6. Parent comment

Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by johansch on Monday November 21, 2016 @10:44AM (#13006191)
Because web sites won't be moving to ipv6 (only) any time soon, and the limiting factor here is residential connections, not Google?

Are you proposing that Google should crawl ipv6-only web sites? And then serve those results to whom, exactly? (I don't think there is any reliable way of knowing whether an HTTP client that's connecting to you via ipv4 is also capable of ipv6?)

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by dx034 on Monday November 21, 2016 @11:37AM (#13006685)
Facebook seems to crawl ipv6 websites using an ipv6 connection. The Google crawler doesn't show up so it's probably working ipv4 only.

I'm just wondering why Google doesn't seem to use ipv6 where available.

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by johansch on Monday November 21, 2016 @11:44AM (#13006745)
You mean they should prioritize ipv6 over ipv4 if a DNS lookup returns records of both? Why?
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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by zokier on Monday November 21, 2016 @12:01PM (#13006904)
That is what RFC6724 recommends as the default:

> Another effect of the default policy table is to prefer communication using IPv6 addresses to communication using IPv4 addresses, if matching source addresses are available.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6724#section-2.1

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by TorKlingberg on Monday November 21, 2016 @11:47AM (#13006772)
Many operating systems now prioritize IPv6 over IPv4. Otherwise there wouldn't be much IPv6 traffic at all.
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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by johansch on Monday November 21, 2016 @12:05PM (#13006937)
If only v6 is available there is no point for them to include the site in their general index.

If both v4 and v6 access is available, what is the extra value of doing the indexing using v6 rather than v4? (The indexing process itself would add very little to the global usage of v6, comparatively speaking.)

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by dx034 on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @03:16AM (#13012542)
In that case, what is the extra value of having ipv6 at all?

And Facebook seems to prefer ipv6, I guess there's a reason for that.

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by johansch on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @05:14PM (#13018159)
Facebook engineers also declared Mark Zuckerberg dead the other week. Maybe there's no deeper lesson here?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/11/facebook_zuckerberg_...

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by dx034 on Tuesday November 22, 2016 @03:15AM (#13012538)
Because otherwise we don't need ipv6. Google advertised the use of ipv6 heavily. If everything still works fine with ipv4 and NATs, why should we ever switch? It's a serious question, I know that the ipv4 space is somehow exhausted, but I can still get very cheap ip addresses (one is included in every $5 vps at major providers).

If even Google with its huge network of crawlers doesn't see the need to communicate via ipv6, why should there be any demand?

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by Nullabillity on Monday November 21, 2016 @11:52AM (#13006814)
> I don't think there is any reliable way of knowing whether an HTTP client that's connecting to you via ipv4 is also capable of ipv6?

Send XHRs to a v4 subdomain and a v6 subdomain, check which requests succeed.

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Re:98% of sites on Cloudflare now use IPv6 by johansch on Monday November 21, 2016 @12:08PM (#13006958)
Sure, messy, but would generally work.

I guess they could also move this checking to the user agent (because they control Chrome) to have the check performed before the user is actually waiting for results and milliseconds matter. Introduce some ugly but pragmatic HTTP header, like "Accept-IP: v6". :)

So, this way they could serve v6-only results reliably to clients that can access either both v4 and v6. (People who can only access v6.. that must be a very special kind of people.)

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