SpenceSellers / UDP-Integrity-Experiment

You always hear that UDP messages aren't reliable, but is that true in the real world? Let's find out.

UDP-Integrity-Experiment

You always hear that UDP messages aren't reliable. They tell you to use UDP in situations where it's OK for packets to disappear randomly, or be corrupted, or be duplicated.

What I want to find out is, does that actually happen? In $CURRENT_YEAR?

Let's send a bunch of UDP datagrams and find out.

Results

Experiment	Datagrams sent	Datagrams corrupted	Datagrams that didn't arrive
LAN between two computers	58,090,836	0	0
Between South US and Canadian VPS	111,256	0	0

Usage

Run server:

./UdpSafety server {port}

Example: ./UdpSafety server 3555

Run client:

./UdpSafety client {server ip}:{port}

Example: ./UdpSafety client 192.168.1.55:3555