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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. The core feature provided by TCP is not reliability, that is trivially easy. What TCP gives us is robust flow control that can detect and adapt to current network capacity.

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CNN has a video transfer tool for b2b subscribers that uses multiple UDP streams to increase transfer speeds. Instead it saturated and brought down our company firewalls, which were older and our main bottleneck. All for just a potentially few more megs of speed on TB sized videos. Gotta be careful with UDP.

That just sounds like your firewalls are made of pentium pros and duct tape. TCP can oversaturate a connection too, and a firewall should be able to handle large packets at line rate.

Yeah the firewalls were ancient and already scheduled for an upgrade. This helped accelerate the schedule for sure. The company had about 800 employees doing all kinds of things, watching Netflix, watching videos on YouTube and Facebook, downloading whole ISO's, not to mention many business processes transferring files around, but the second one person started using this video downloader tool it brought everything to a crawl.

> a video transfer tool for b2b subscribers that uses multiple UDP streams

That sounds like FASP (http://asperasoft.com/technology/transport/fasp/)

I believe something like that was the underlying tech. I researched it at the time but I just can't remember 100% now, although I think that was it. It actually was implemented via a Java applet in the browser, so there was no way we could block or restrict a specific exe with group policy. The firewalls were already scheduled for replacement/upgrade, so for a few weeks we ended up just watching traffic and slapping wrists if more than one person ever tried to use the tool at the same time.

A robust flow control that's tuned for bulk downloads, and badly adapted for small real-time streams.

Sure. And not even the best known flow control mechanism. But nonetheless that is the important innovation of TCP, not reliability. The post by lobster_johnson upthread implied that you could use UDP for "bulk data transfer", which basically doesn't work without reinventing something akin to TCP.

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