home 16 Oct 2014 - By Karl Seguin I realized something recently: I know virtually nothing about UDP. Oh, I know it's connectionless, has no handshaking and thus doesn't provide any guarantees about delivery or ordering. But, in practice, what does that actually mean? I setup 5 VPS to send each other a few UDP packets over a 7 hour period. I didn't send much traffic (though that's certainly worth trying). Each server, every 9-11 second, randomly picked a target and sent 5-10 packets ranging from 16 to 1016 bytes. 2 servers were in the same data center in New Jersey. 1 each in LA, Amsterdam and Tokyo. The first thing I wanted to know was how unreliable UDP was. Are we talking about a delivery rate of 25%? 50%? 75%? Packets Received - click table to toggle % Receiver NJ 1 NJ 2 LA NLD JPN NJ 1 - 2981/2981 2888/2889 2964/2964 3053/3054 NJ 2 3016/3016 - 3100/310...