Friday 17 January 2020

Happy Eyeballs. Unhappy user.

As part of the migration efforts to IPv6, many programs implement a system known as "happy eyeballs". The basic premise is that sometimes, IPv6 "is flaky", and after a while, you should give up and take the IPv4 option - resulting in some "happy eyeballs". In a dual stack system, IPv6 is preferred.

Well the thing about this is it is S L O W... and users (not unreasonably) get grumpy about it. Here's a case where something went wrong, and *everything* was subjected to this delay.