Re:40% of Google users now connect via IPv6
by londons_explore on Sunday July 03, 2022 @02:23PM
(#31969819)
You can still do hardware NAT for the few thousand connections with the most packets and software NAT for everything else.
I bet across even an ISP network of a million users, 80% of the traffic at any point in time is within 10,000 connections.
Re:40% of Google users now connect via IPv6
by stingraycharles on Sunday July 03, 2022 @02:46PM
(#31969978)
You do realise that almost all connections are long-lived, and burst up and down in throughput? So the 10,000 “heaviest” connections right now are not the same as in, say, 3 seconds from now ?
So you propose constantly swapping in and out connections from “hardware NAT” to “software NAT”? What heuristic will you use to decide which connections go where?
Such a heuristic will probably look a lot like QoS, which is even more (much more!) resource hungry than NAT.
At which point will the obvious conclusion be, “maybe the carriers who actually deal with these problems have a point, NAT is indeed a significant amount of complexity, and let’s be happy IPv6 starts to make actual economic sense?”
But that's besides the point. Your home router can easily have millions of connections open (if they didn't skimp on the ram anyway), but if you have CGNAT boxes that do the same for tens of thousands of customers you also have to take into account that they have to move a lot of traffic. This means routing and doing NAT in software won't cut it anymore, but you need dedicated hardware coupled with very fast specialized memory to handle that traffic.