Dissecting Dual-Stack Website Content

Abstract

The ongoing shift from IPv4 to IPv6 is crucial for the evolving Internet landscape. However, the prevalence of dual-stacked environments requires a deeper understanding of how web content is distributed across both protocols, especially given the varied nature of websites configurations. While prior studies have focused on IPv6 adoption and performance metrics, limited research explores dual-stacked servers’ impact on the application layer where user experience is directly affected. To address this gap, we developed NetQuartz, a tool designed to assess the performance and the content delivery of websites across dual-stack servers. We have deployed NetQuartz over several vantage points and collected data for more than 200,000 websites, revealing patterns by classifying them into three classes based on server configurations: (i) Fully IPv4 websites, where all resources are loaded from IPv4-only servers; (ii) Fully Dual-Stacked websites, which load all their resources from servers supporting both IPv4 and IPv6; (iii) Mixed websites, which retrieve resources from a combination of both server types. Script and Image were identified as the two most dominant categories in terms of content, regardless of the website’s class. Fully IPv4 websites generally contained fewer resources, leading to smaller page sizes and faster load times. Fully Dual-Stacked and Mixed configuration websites showed better performance under IPv6-preferenced loading, despite Mixed websites tending to load more resources over IPv4. The thesis is organized as follows: (i) we start by introducing the context and motivations behind this work; (ii) we position our work with respect to the state of the art; (iii) we then provide a detailed explanation of NetQuartz and its implementation; (iv) we discuss the data collection methodology, explaining the setup and execution of our measurement environment; (v) we present our results, first exploring the delivery of web content across websites, we also examine the specific dual-stack content distribution of Mixed websites, then assessing broader performance measures within the three website classes and we finally discuss a few topics related to the user experience when browsing a website; (vi) finally, this thesis is concluded by summarising its main achievements and suggesting areas for future researches.