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Comment by culpable_pickle | Hacker News Reader

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Datagram_Protocol would like a word

While there are users for UDP, I would guess that TCP accounts for more traffic by choice. Of course there are sometimes problems associated with too much buffer too.

UDP is almost always used with buffers, error correction codes, and other measures to deal with imperfection

Yes, but I think UDP is still a good counter example for this analogy. Buffers can be detrimental to udp traffic for real-time use cases (eg VOIP). Here your trade off is quality (in voice this is jitter) versus latency. Typically you want to make this choice of buffer size at the receiving end only, and keep buffers elsewhere as small as possible - routers which store and forward, network card buffers,OS buffers etc, can add up to lots of bloat.

So for VOIP "JIT" is a good thing and your "Inventory" levels need to be tuned at the receiver.

Ouch, thanks for the pushback!

But isn’t it called tcp/ip for a reason?

Do you use a VPN to connect your corporate laptop to your employer’s network from home? Do you use Wireguard, or its easier-to-use derivative, Tailescale, to connect any of your devices? Do you use any form of VOIP (Voice over IP)?

(Edited because I forgot the big one) Have you ever used a name and not an IP address to connect to something on the internet?

Congratulations! You’re a UDP user!

Yes! I absolutely use UDP!

I once built a prototype network stack on top of a udp library that simulated a physical network layer..

Doesn’t change the fact that tcp/ip was the network stack that enabled the internet.

But I was trying to sidestep that tangent by mentioning link layer protocols in my second paragraph.

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