[ NNSquad ] Re: Keith Dawson: uTorrent Responds Regarding UDP Usage

[Wes Felter <wesley@felter.org>]

On Dec 1, 2008, at 9:08 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:

> Can I see a show of hands from all who think that shifting half the  
> Internet's traffic to UDP is no big deal?

No doubt there will be consequences, but it's not clear that they will  
be disastrous.

> If the TCP congestion avoidance algorithm doesn't work well - which  
> is true - why not fix it instead of bypassing it?

Because P2P app developers can't modify the OS kernel. People use the  
tools available to them (even if they're the wrong tools) to solve  
problems in a way that they understand (even if it's the wrong  
solution), so we have BitTorrent Inc. designing new transport  
protocols because they can't modify TCP.

So on a positive note, let's encourage Microsoft to implement  
something like TCP Nice or ledbat so that app developers won't have to.

Wes Felter - wesley@felter.org - http://felter.org/wesley/