[robinleepowell]

To be a lot more specific, here's an IRC chat with people who know more about networking than I can even begin to describe (I work at a company that has some people that are truly frighteningly good with networking):

- -------------

<me> General technical question: is UDP still going to be faster than TCP when

<me> you're using it to send like large files and such?

<speaker1> what does it mean that UDP is faster than TCP?

<speaker1> define "faster"

<me> Uhhh, I'm transfering a 100K of data from machine a to machine b.

<me> Faster is defined as it would be in a dictionary.

<me> 'Takes less time'.

<speaker1> your data won't get tehre if you use UDP

<speaker1> and it will if you use TCP

<speaker1> so I guess infinity is kinda slow

<speaker1> unless you implement guaranteed delivery on top of UDP

<me> Assuming that the UDP-based mechanism ... yeah, that.

<speaker1> in which case you may as well use TCP and take a couple extra round trips for the connection setup

<speaker2> then you're just reimpling tcp

<me> Cool, thanks.

<speaker4> If you need the entire file then use TCP

<speaker4> If you can afford to loose chunks but you want to get the data you do get sooner then use UDP

<speaker2> or if you don't need the data to be in sequence

<speaker2> but you need all of it

* speaker3 has flashbacks to shouting this argument at Dreamcast game developers

<speaker1> well, you still won't get all of it without guaranteed delivery

<speaker2> right, but you can build guaranteed delivery without sequencing very easily

<me> Yes, I am trying to explain to people on a game forum that if you have 5 people connected to a game where it occasionally transfers large amounts of data (relative to packet size), with no data
transfer between those (it's turn based), it will *not*
slow down when you move to TCP.

<me> Especially when several players are on modems.

<speaker1> uh, of course not

<speaker1> it'll just take a half second longer to start up the connection

- ------------

-Robin