Hacker News Reader

Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

Using UDP with the web on a wide scale will either replicate everything in TCP, inside UDP wrapping, or else cause big problems all over the Internet.

It will be fast only in the beginning when a few clients are participating, but then screw over the infrastructure with degenerative congestive behaviors when "everyone" is on it. And by then, it will be a standard everyone is stuck with, with the only way out being to complicate it with a tirade of hacky refinements based on guesswork combined with crossed fingers.

That's not even considering malicious interference: what sorts of attacks will be discovered on this new UDP based shit, and what sorts of hacks will be required to mitigate them.

View on HN

I know that was the conventional wisdom, from back when backbone links were the bottleneck. But in the modern internet, almost all the congestion is at the edges.

Since most traffic for games is server->client, most of the congestion will happen when several users are competing for the same customer link (DSL or cable modem). This already happens with streaming services, and people just yell at each other to stop downloading updates while I'm watching Netflix.

That could change one fine day when those edges get their stuff together.

Indeed, the subscriber lines and surrounding edge hardware have not kept up with the times. Depending on where you are and who your provider is, chances are you're getting the same shitty line rates you had ten years ago (or more), though you have more memory, a bigger hard drive and a faster CPU, and the backbone is faster.

Anywhere with a lot of Gigabit Fiber installed, the congestion is _not_ at the edges. It's further in. If all of those installed Gigabit edges simultaneously used 1 Gbps download, it wouldn't happen. They'd get much less.

Too late... Chrome already uses HTTP over UDP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC

And choose the first option: replicating all the important parts of TCP inside UDP. Which is fine, but a lot of effort.

But it doesn't open a ridiculous number of tabs at the same time quickly and with low resource usage, so it's supposedly dead in the water now. :) :) :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com