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0 pointsClumsyPilot2y ago0 comments

> The problem isn't ipv6 (even with the tons of extra features that ipv6 forces upon you)

The year is 2023, The chromium engine is full blown operating system, it has notifications, background task management, GPU acceleration for general compute, it's larger than Windows XP, and can in fact run windows XP in the browser. Teams consumes 500 mb of ram to do the same job ICQ did in 2002 with 5 mb of ram. Cars have 4G, lightbulbs need updates and security patches.

But Ipv6 features take a few extra bytes and are a problem.

0 comments

rewmie2y ago

> But Ipv6 features take a few extra bytes and are a problem.

Some people pay for each extra byte they have to send through a network, and design whole systems around the goal of minimizing the amount of data they ship around.

No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.

MereInterest2y ago

> No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.

Sure they do. It just doesn’t show up in Chrome’s metrics so Chrome doesn’t care about it.

* Start-up time of other applications. If a program needs 1 GB of RAM, and Chrome is holding all but 512 MB, then the program must perform multiple allocations, waiting for Chrome to release its cache after each one.

* Smaller cache in other programs. Consider a program that can run with 4 MB of RAM, but could use up to 1 GB of RAM to cache intermediate results and improve performance. Such a program would check the amount of RAM available and scale their own cache size accordingly.

* Competing caches in multiple Chrome instances. Multiple independent Chrome instances, such as from Electron shells, each try to cache as much as possible until RAM is exhausted.

azernik2y ago

This concern about an extra few bytes is substantial in approximately zero organizations' IPv6 adoption decisions.

Macha2y ago

In fact some of the earliest adopters of IPv6 were Google, Microsoft, Netflix. Companies who when you're considering the problem of (N * a few bytes) have a very large N so are the most likely to have material costs from it. Yet even to them, it's a rounding error.

azernik2y ago

Pedantic note:

For Netflix the cost is actually especially low. Cost as a percent of bandwidth is (a few bytes / packet size), and when you're streaming enormous media files packets are almost always max size.

crest2y ago

The user pays for it or suffers the consequences. Anyone relying on such bloated browsers has externalised the cost for coming up with a resource efficient alternative to their users.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

rewmie2y ago

> But Ipv6 features take a few extra bytes and are a problem.

Some people pay for each extra byte they have to send through a network, and design whole systems around the goal of minimizing the amount of data they ship around.

No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.

MereInterest2y ago

> No one pays for the extra free gigabyte that Chrome takes over.

Sure they do. It just doesn’t show up in Chrome’s metrics so Chrome doesn’t care about it.

* Competing caches in multiple Chrome instances. Multiple independent Chrome instances, such as from Electron shells, each try to cache as much as possible until RAM is exhausted.

azernik2y ago

This concern about an extra few bytes is substantial in approximately zero organizations' IPv6 adoption decisions.

Macha2y ago

azernik2y ago

Pedantic note:

For Netflix the cost is actually especially low. Cost as a percent of bandwidth is (a few bytes / packet size), and when you're streaming enormous media files packets are almost always max size.

crest2y ago

The user pays for it or suffers the consequences. Anyone relying on such bloated browsers has externalised the cost for coming up with a resource efficient alternative to their users.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse