Julia EvansJun 19, 2024

poll: have you ever designed a protocol that uses TCP or UDP directly? (vs using protocols that are based on TCP/UDP like DNS, HTTP, SSH, etc)

(you can pick more than one)

yes, TCP
36.1%
yes, UDP
24.3%
no, but I’ve used protocols based on them
37%
other
2.6%
Poll ended at .
Show threadJulia EvansJun 19, 2024

I'm so curious about what the 30% of you who are designing custom UDP-based protocols are doing, I would love to hear more!

(please only reply if you responded “yes, UDP” to the above poll)

Show threadJef PoskanzerJun 19, 2024
@b0rk High volume traffic generator for network testing.
Show threadChris Siebenmann
@jef @b0rk And now I remember that I wrote one of those too, back in 2008. The reason we wrote it was that we were using NFS over UDP at the time, and I wanted to stress-test UDP on some new NFS servers without having to figure out how to make the disks and NFS itself go fast enough. So I wrote something that simulated 'small request, big reply' over UDP (one typical NFS packet pattern). It was an actual protocol because it had embedded sequence numbers to track losses.
Jun 19, 2024 at 8:57pmWeb