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)
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)
@b0rk I have only used UDP in situations where I’m either sending very sparse packets of data on a timer say and I actually don’t care if any one particular one makes it, or when doing time sensitive data over a LAN as in teleoperation.
Anything else and you risk being a bad citizen by ignoring the TCP exponential back off algorithm. I strongly advise against using UDP unless you have a fixed data rate and you really care about not building a backlog of packets.
I didn't write this code, so I didn't count it in the poll, but the software I currently maintain uses UDP in local network broadcast to query for the hardware devices it could connect to.
This is another pretty good use case as it doesn't need to establish a connection.
As it's only when the GUI has been commanded to connect to something, and polls slowly even then, one doesn't need to worry about saturating the network, backoff, or similar issues.
Julia Evans
Mark Pauley
Clifton Royston