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Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

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Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about SENDING requests with "zero latency", not about completing http operations with zero latency. And yes, you get no confirmation, and no reply. I must admit I'm hard pressed to come up with a use case for this. You could just as easily do a regular HTTP request on a separate thread and throw away the result to get "zero latency" fire-and-forget behavior.

>a use case for this Logging/analytics?

Do you really want a log that might have useful information incase of meltdown? I think logging is something you should probably confirm or you’re setting yourself up for nasty bugs.

Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#62
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finding a use case for this would be tricky... I can tell you a real life use case that already exists because I built this exact thing already (though a closed-source version): satellite internet terminals. With satellite internet, uplink (upload) is generally more complicated than downlink (download). This is because a terminal can just passively listen for packets intended for him, but with uplink you have to ma…

Wouldn't such a system be a big security hole?

No because you can still use cryptographic signatures to ensure the packets are valid before acting on them.

Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#63
post #48
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've always been curious about with JackBox is if it does anything when everyone's on the same LAN?

not sure what you have in mind, but no not currently

What about household vs household games? Bring a new meaning to keeping up with the Jones’s :)

Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#64
post #37

I dont know why more web servers are not using UDP by default and only go TCP when the client or content needs it. For example, sites like youtube - the videos must be streamed to us, why not the site itself? Only when I want the client to definitley know it sent data (a banking transaction, an amazon order) but for the vast majority of sites UDP bi-di should be fine. Can you imagine the amount of bandwidth saved aro…

UDP does not have congestion or flow control.

Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#65

This doesn't just magically remove the latency. * I presume the case here is the proxy is close to the server so the handshake is faster and thus the single benefit of this setup, although that's not at all what's illustrated. * The illustrations show the request taking longer with the proxy, although maybe the two diagrams aren't to scale * The originating UDP packet could get lost and the client would never know Th…

It's about SENDING requests with "zero latency", not about completing http operations with zero latency. And yes, you get no confirmation, and no reply. I must admit I'm hard pressed to come up with a use case for this. You could just as easily do a regular HTTP request on a separate thread and throw away the result to get "zero latency" fire-and-forget behavior.

What's the difference then between a thoughtless hello and by HTTP send vs a UDP send? Wouldn't UDP still be faster?

Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#66
I'm going to sacrifice my karma for this: the solution is not to make TCP use UDP, but instead to allow TCP to behave like UDP by giving it the option to ignore out-of-order. All operatives have flawed implementaions of this, but we need it to be in the TCP RFC.

Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#67

UDP doesn't implement: - Reliable delivery - Ordering - Congestion control - Flow control ...and a large list of RFCs that I'll never ever read. If you are delivering a document (like a webpage or an API response), or transferring files, you want these things. If you are doing real-time stuff, like video, voice, real-time games... and you just need the most recent information, that's where UDP shines.

I think the author is aware of that. I think it's more an easy way to 'udp-fy' existing tcp services and only update the client to use udp

Re: Show HN: A UDP to TCP proxy server for sending HTTP requests with zero latency

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a use case for this Logging/analytics?

Do you really want a log that might have useful information incase of meltdown? I think logging is something you should probably confirm or you’re setting yourself up for nasty bugs.

A lot of logging software allows for UDP connections though. Not all logs are critical, and in times when you have close to 100% network saturation, dropping some log traffic to maintain a functional production environment is not a big deal for most.
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