Mastodawn

Julia Evans Jun 19, 2024

when I asked people to explain how UDP works I got a lot of answers to the effect of "it's spray and pray"

but I'm having trouble thinking of examples of UDP-based protocols that actually work in a "spray and pray" way —

* DNS is "send 1 packet, retry if you don't get a reply”
* QUIC is a sophisticated system for streaming data over UDP
* I'd guess that video protocols correct for packet loss
* maybe statsd is a "spray and pray” system?

(please do not reply to this explaining how UDP works)

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PresGas - RPG and Left Nerd

@b0rk I recall NFS used to be, but I think that's pretty much gone by the wayside. TBH I can't think of a more recent tech that is "exclusively" UDP ...hmmmmm...

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Chris Siebenmann Jun 19, 2024

@PresGas @b0rk I think (udp) NFS wasn't quite spray and pray in this sense; much like DNS, the UDP packet itself might get lost but the client was expected to retry.

(The server did not retry its answers, which led to all sorts of fun. Clients were expected to retry an operation that didn't get a reply, but some operations can't be retried cleanly if they already succeeded, so servers added hacks to recognize such retried operations, and etc etc.)