2011/01/30

Speed of accessing web pages by dual-stack hosts and IPv4 single stack hosts

Can we say dual-stack hosts access web pages a bit slower than those hosts that ride on IPv4 only ? The answer is yes.

When browsing a website, dual stack hosts running Windows 7 will request AAAA record first and then follow by A record in the authoritative name server. In the case of IPv4 single stack hosts, only A record is queried. However, the difference should be 0.0x % and it should be hardly noticeable by users. To be fair, the extra query is necessary as dual-stack hosts take care of selecting IPv6 or IPv4 path to access a particular web server.  If both IPv4 and IPv6 paths can access the web site, IPv6 will always be selected first.

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