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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Avdi Grimm

@b0rk most of the UDP programming I did was multicast so it was indeed "spray". However the particular protocol I was implementing was a form of "reliable multicast" so it was more "spray and try very hard to follow up". In retrospect I think the whole project was based on local superstition that we didn't have the bandwidth for "redundant" TCP/IP streams.