UDP reliability

Aquadasoftians, how reliable would you say UDP Blast is on getting the message to recipients?

That will depend very much on how far the packet is taking. I remember running the server on my dedicated box that is on the same network as my machine, and I never misplaced a packet. But let the UDP packets loose on the web and they'll start getting lost due to collisions. Something to try is to create an application that sends a blasted message to the server, and then the server sends back a TCP receipt when it's received (just like how TCP actually works) and get the app to calculate the percentage that get through. It'll probably be a lot higher than you'd imagine.

Actually, I've already created an app that sends a UDP every 15/100th of a second.

This app has a send counter and a receive counter.

I run 2 instances of it and if the counter is off, then a udp packet was lost.

when i run it internally (against my own server), just as you said, I see no loss of packets.

I can't run it externally as of yet, because here at my office, apparently we're blocking external UDP from getting back in, or there is a 100% loss. Not sure which.


I want to know this because I'm in the process of re-writing my game to be as efficient as I can get it. If UDP (blast messages) work well enough, that's how I'll do it.

I'll likely build a UDP test cycle into the startup of the game, and if UDP fails, I'll have it use TCP (Send) instead.

UDP is broken in the latest build. I've just fixed it, so give me 20 minutes and I'll upload a new one.

I'm quite pleased with UDP (BLAST). I sent 500+ blasts at 15/100 second interval and only lost 1 packet in my initial test.

I then ran a second test, same method, and hit 100% of all packets sent were received (this was also 500+ blasts of a text message.)

Additional tests had minimal loss (never more than 2 packets lost) in batches of 500 blasts.

Considering the distance between Austin, TX and the klikfarm server, i'd say this is great results.