Chapter 19. UDP Servers TCP provides reliable connection-oriented network service, but at the cost of some overhead in setting up and tearing down connections and maintaining the fidelity of the data stream. As we have seen, there's also programmer overhead: TCP server applications have to go to some lengths to handle multiple concurrent clients . Sometimes 100 percent reliability isn't necessary. Perhaps the application can tolerate an occasional dropped or out-of-order packet, or perhaps it can simply retransmit a message that hasn't been acknowledged . In such cases, UDP offers a simple, lightweight solution. |