spectre & meltdown.
> you get 2 us of processing in addition to a full system call to reach 4 Gb/s
TCP has route binding, UDP does not (connect(2) helps one side, but not both sides).
> “But encryption is slow.” Not that slow.
Encryption _is slow_ for small PDUs, at least the common constructions we're currently using. Everyone's essentially been optimizing for and benchmarking TCP with large frames.
If you hot loop the state as the micro-benchmarks do you can do better, but you still see a very visible cost of state setup that only starts to amortize decently well above 1024 byte payloads. Eradicate a bunch of cache efficiency by removing the tightness of the loop and this amortization boundary shifts quite far to the right, up into tens of kilobytes.
---
All of the above, plus the additional framing overheads come into play. Hell even the OOB data blocks are quite expensive to actually validate, it's not a good API to fix this problem, it's just the API we have shoved over bsd sockets.
And we haven't even gotten to buffer constraints and contention yet, but the default UDP buffer memory available on most systems is woefully inadequate for these use cases today. TCP buffers were scaled over time, but UDP buffers basically never were, they're still conservative values from the late 90s/00s really.
The API we really need for this kind of UDP setup is one where you can do something like fork the fd, connect(2) it with a full route bind, and then fix the RSS/XSS challenges that come from this splitting. After that we need a submission queue API rather than another bsd sockets ioctl style mess (uring, rio, etc). Sadly none of this is portable.
On the crypto side there are KDF approaches which can remove a lot of the state cost involved, it's not popular but some vendors are very taken with PSP for this reason - but PSP becoming more well known or used was largely suppressed by its various rejections in the ietf and in linux. Vendors doing scale tests with it have clear numbers though, under high concurrency you can scale this much better than the common tls or tls like constructions.