Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: Tumor on November 20, 2002, 09:50:13 PM
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Is it just me or would it be better to just get disconnected rather than sit through the UDP connection thing? Not ONCE have I ever survived that thing.
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My connection survives the switch to TCP maybe 25% of the time. It is noticably warpier afterwards through, with the beacon light flashing on and off intermittantly.
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Originally posted by Gryffin
My connection survives the switch to TCP maybe 25% of the time. It is noticably warpier afterwards through, with the beacon light flashing on and off intermittantly.
That's because the TCP/IP protocol is oriented around connection security -- it has mechanisms to ensure that every packet that gets sent gets retrieved, even if they have to be retransmitted several times. What it gives up in order to get this is packet sequencing -- if the host computer sends packets 1 2 3 4 5, the client computer could get 1 [garble of packet 2] 3 [garble of packet 2 resend] [garble of packet 4] 5 4 2, and then have to put them back in order after it gets them. As a result, the amount of time it takes to get any given group of packets can vary, so the host updates will become irregular. Since the switch from UDP to TCP is due to excessive packet loss, retransmits are pretty well guaranteed, so you're going to wind up with each set of updates from the host taking varying amounts of time -- hence the warpage.
Breaking it down to a short answer, whenever you get switched to TCP, you're more certain to get all the update data, but you don't know how long each update will take, so you've been sent to Warp City.