Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 18 submissions in the queue.
posted by martyb on Sunday March 27 2016, @12:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the could-this-site-run-without-both-of-them? dept.

Discussion on the advantages of TCP vs UDP (and vice versa) has a history which is almost as long as the eternal Linux-vs-Windows debate. As I have long been a supporter of the point of view that both UDP and TCP have their own niches (see, for example, [NoBugs15]), here are my two cents on this subject.

Note for those who already know the basics of IP and TCP: please skip to the 'Closing the Gap: Improving TCP Interactivity' section, as you still may be able to find a thing or two of interest.

It's a primer, or a refresher, or a skip. We have all kinds here. Enjoy, or don't.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27 2016, @08:56PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27 2016, @08:56PM (#323640)

    You can build reliability on top of UDP, but it's a lot of work to get it right. Obviously, that's what they signed up to do, unless they're using a third party protocol library.

    There's the risk of starting on the path of re-inventing TCP to deal with all the pitfalls the original TCP developers ran into over 20-25 years. For example, flow control; what if the master node (the one dispatching the requests) runs short of message buffer space? TCP has a solution for that, UDP doesn't.