I run a small network of small sites, including a couple in the Adirondacks with 56k feeds. When a user of one of these sites uses one of the UDP audio or video services it drives the 56k to 100% saturation (load 255/255) and makes the site unusable for everyone else.
Recently I "solved" this problem by blocking this traffic at the entry port for my T1 feed. To my surprise, both the average and peak traffic on the T1 dropped by a factor of 3, although less than 2% of my users complained.
Traffic on my T1 wasn't the issue, but this has me wondering: how much of the Internet congestion my users do complain about is due to UDP audio/video services?
In my very limited view of the world, UDP is a very poor network citizen among protocols. Am I wrong in that view?
no not really. udp unlike tcp has no form of inherent rate control and must rely on the application, unlike tcp which performs rate control (congestion control). for sake of discussion we can roughly equate net citizen ship with how fairly it uses the network, in otherwords it's cc. this being the case udp is not really a citizen, (since it has no cc) like tcp is, rather the bad citizen is the application or the user. :)
-- Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, Pearly Gateway, Ballston Spa, NY stpeters@NetHeaven.com Owner, NetHeaven 518-885-1295/800-910-6671 Internet for Albany/Saratoga, Glens Falls, North Creek, & Lake Placid First Internet service based in the 518 area code
-- - rusty eddy@isi.edu