UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a lightweight core internet messaging protocol, enabling servers to pass around concise datagrams. UDP was designed with a minimum of protocol overhead, forgoing delivery, ordering, and duplication prevention mechanisms in favor of ensuring high performance. UDP is a good choice when perfect reliability is not required and high-speed transmission is, such as what is found in networked video games and videoconferencing applications.
This is not to say that UDP is normally unreliable. In most applications, it delivers messages with high probability. It is simply not suitable when perfect reliability is needed, such as in a banking application. It is an excellent candidate for monitoring and logging applications, and for non-critical messaging services.
Creating a UDP server with Node is straightforward:
const dgram = require...
