Home / server / Questions / 1012186
Accepted
Robert Meany
Asked: 2020-04-14 17:50:40 +0800 CST

Would there be less load on a NAT firewall if some or all of the traffic were routed over IPV6 Instead of IPV4?

  • 772

Just curious.. I was thinking that, on a NAT firewall that is normally overloaded, offloading some or all of the IPV4 traffic to IPV6 might make a performance difference?

firewall nat ipv6

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Yes.

    NAT can cause issues in a NAT firewall multiple ways. It would put a slightly lower load on the router CPU to ipv6 instead, although NAT is fairly lightweight and it likely don't make a big difference to the CPU.

    What is more relevant - and likely the cause of many issues is the size and number of entries.in the connection tracking table - is the mappings between lots of internal addresses and lots of external addresses. Especially in cases where you have.multiple internal sites hitting few external sites or using complex protocols. This is what tends to cause pain in NAT firewalls, and the ability to handle this at scale is the difference between regular NAT and Carrier Grade NAT. By moving to IPV6, you eliminate this issue.

    • 2