/plushcap/analysis/cloudflare/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-udp-sockets-but-were-afraid-to-ask-part-1

Everything you ever wanted to know about UDP sockets but were afraid to ask, part 1

What's this blog post about?

The text discusses the inner workings of User Datagram Protocol (UDP) within Cloudflare's Spectrum service. It highlights that while UDP is simple in principle, there is a lot of domain knowledge needed to run things at scale. The text covers topics such as connected vs unconnected sockets, handling packets from wildcard sockets, and the challenges of graceful server restarts for UDP services. It also introduces an "established-over-unconnected" technique that can help manage long-lived flows in a UDP environment. The text concludes by noting that there are still many complexities to explore within the realm of production UDP servers.

Company
Cloudflare

Date published
Nov. 25, 2021

Author(s)
Marek Majkowski

Word count
1551

Hacker News points
69

Language
English


By Matt Makai. 2021-2024.