Even hardware with good IPv6 performance seems to forward at half
the
rate
of IPv4/MPLS packets;
we call that crappy hardware
Based on such point of view, non-crappy hardware would be: (blank) and crappy hardware would be (blank), could you fill the blanks ?
As with so many other situations, the blanks can be filled in with "Juniper" and "Cisco", in that order.
I don't get why Juniper and Cisco trie-lookup forwarding would differ in comparing IPv4 and IPv6; Juniper does a 8+1+1+1+1+... search until a leaf node is found, while Cisco does 16+8+8 (or something near it but still with 3 phases); for both architetures, IPv6 longer addresses implies walking more deeply into the tree in order to find where to route. Just to be sure, my point here is not where the effective IPv6 performance suits one needs or not, but wether a router that can forward <amount> Mpps of IPv4/MPLS packets can also forward the same amount of IPv6 packets per second. Rubens