Easy Happy Eyeballs Testing

Easy Happy Eyeballs Testing

Nice article on http://ipv6friday.org/blog/2012/11/happy-testing/ how to test your application against Happy Eyeballs. In short, "Happy Eyeballs" (RFC 6555) means choosing the most fast (or fast enough) connection on dual-stack systems (IPv4 and IPv6).

And the testing is easy: use the URLs below in your applications (wget, curl, chrome, firefox, etc) to test your application's behaviour

http://badipv6.test.ipv6friday.org/
http://badipv4.test.ipv6friday.org/

A 'good' (= Happy Eyeballed) application should NOT get a slow time-out, but should connect with a second or so.

Example: curl (version 7.27.0) is not Happy-Eyeballed:


sander@R540:~$ time curl http://badipv4.test.ipv6friday.org/ > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   226  100   226    0     0   2054      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--  4520

real 0m0.124s
user 0m0.012s
sys 0m0.004s
sander@R540:~$ 

sander@R540:~$ time curl http://badipv6.test.ipv6friday.org/ > /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   226  100   226    0     0      3      0  0:01:15  0:01:03  0:00:12    54

real 1m3.227s
user 0m0.020s
sys 0m0.008s
sander@R540:~$

Explanation: the second URL takes more than one minute (!), so curl 7.27.0 waits for a loooong timeout. :-(