On Thu, 2007-10-11 at 16:30 +0000, glyph@divmod.com wrote:
On 03:20 pm, sipickles@hotmail.com wrote:
UDP is often used in online gaming, where other methods are employed to compensate for its weaknesses, in return for its speed.
"Speed" is an oversimplified way of explaining this usage.
Some games use a TCP control channel for most logical messages and UDP for updates to a small set of values where only the _most current_ value ever matters. This is most often the position, orientation, and velocity of an object in the game world. This can improve the apparent performance of twitchy games over lossy links.
Some games, having heard secondhand about this previous strategy, use UDP for everything because their implementors mistakenly believe that it's faster than TCP. Often, these games eventually switch to TCP later in the development cycle when networking bugs and profiling indicate that the features of TCP are actually required or the performance "gains" are actually losses. For example, routers on the public internet can and often do cheat in a variety of ways to use the additional information that TCP provides to make it go faster. UDP can't take advantage of that and its overall throughput is often slower (especially on congested networks).
_______________________________________________ Twisted-Python mailing list Twisted-Python@twistedmatrix.com http://twistedmatrix.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/twisted-python -- George Pauly Ring Development www.ringdevelopment.com