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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.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 27 2016, @08:56PM
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.