>> The common wisdom is: >> >> use TCP if you want reliable delivery >> >> use UDP if you want unreliable delivery >> What the *(& does that mean? Who wants unreliability?

I dont agree with the premise of this article, UDP isnt for unreliability, it provides a tradeoff which trades speed and efficiency and provides best-efforts instead of guarantees.

It makes sense depending on your application. For example, if I have a real-time multi-player video game, and things fall behind, the items which fell behind no longer matter because the state of the game changed. Same thing for a high-speed trading application -- I only care about the most recent market data in some circumstances, not what happened 100ms ago.