April 5, 2005
11:26 a.m.
Intra-net where you are broadcasting updates or patches to a cluster of machines it makes since, but for peer-to-peer it just doesn't reap any benefits on the internet proper.
You are wrong, UDP is more and more adopted by end-user P2P software because of its ability to transparently go through - in and out - many types of NAT devices (which are themselves more and more popular among home users). Incoming TCP traffic, on the other hand, often needs to be specifically enabled on the NAT box. For juicy details, you can read the RFC for the STUN protocol (Simple Traversal of User Datagram Protocol - UDP - Through Network Address Translators - NATs): http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3489.html Regards Antoine.