« After some heated discussions about packet sizes on the mailinglist of the IETF v6ops working group, I decided to do some measurements to find out what maximum packet sizes are supported on today's internet. I did this by capturing two types of packets: the ICMP "too big" messages that routers send to tell a computer to send smaller packets, and the first packet of a TCP session, which contains the MSS option.
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The data showed no fewer than 72 different MTU sizes for IPv4, ranging from 576 to 9198 bytes. However, both of these extremes only showed up once, and other values below 1280 and above 1500 are also quite rare:
I found the 9001 value quite curious; computers really like to work on nice round multiples of 2, 4 or 8 bytes. 9001, on the other hand, is a prime number. Turns out that 9001 bytes is used Amazon's datacenters, where some of the bots that index my website reside.
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These are the results for IPv6 with the < 1% values removed (there were no values below 1280 and above 1500)
1280 and 1480 are probably IPv6-in-IPv4 tunnels and 1428 AYIYA tunnels. 1472 could be IPv6-in-UDP-in-IPv4 tunnels or IPv6-in-IPv4-over-PPPoE.
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The 90th percentile MTU size is 1428 for IPv6 and 1440 for IPv4. Obviously 100% of IPv6 systems support 1280, but 99.7% of IPv4 systems also support this size.
The MSS reflects the maximum size that the systems at both ends of a connection think they can use. However, there may be a bottleneck somewhere along the path. In that case, routers send back an ICMP Packet Too Big message. »
Biais stat : un seul point de mesure (serveur de l'auteur) ... Public pas représentatif : il faut venir sur son site web qu'il faut connaître + site web pas représentatif des sites web populaires d'aujourd'hui
Via
https://twitter.com/iljitsch/status/545194367351545856
ÉDIT : deuxième partie :
http://www.bgpexpert.com/article.php?article=152
« In almost a week, I received zero IPv4 "too big" messages. So it seems in the IPv4 world, path MTU discovery is dead. Turns out that so many people filter ICMP messages, that if you rely on PMTUD for IPv4, there's just too much breakage. So what (home) routers that sit in front of a reduced-MTU link do is "MSS clamping". They rewrite the value in the TCP MSS option to what's supported on the interface they're about to transmit the packet over.
(Please don't read this as "it's ok to filter ICMP "too big" messages. It could easily be that some users still depend on these.)
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Hopefully, IPv6 won't lose PMTUD to ICMP filtering like IPv4 did. MSS clamping is effective for TCP, but it doesn't work for non-TCP protocols or IPsec-protected communication. It's also a burden on routers.
Stéphane Bortzmeyer replied to yesterday's post with a link to this 20-year-old (to the day!) message, which has results for very similar measurements. The results are different in interesting ways, with the real stunner being that in 1994, 94% of all systems could handle 1500 bytes, but in 2014, this is down to 65%. »