UDP是完美的VoIP地址，其中数据包必须发送不考虑其可靠性… 视频聊天是UDP的一个例子(你可以在任何视频聊天期间通过wireshark网络捕获来检查它)。 而且TCP不能与DNS和SNMP协议一起使用。 UDP没有任何开销，而TCP有很多开销

UDP在需要速度时使用，如果数据包不需要，则使用精度，而TCP在需要精度时使用。

UDP通常比较难，因为你必须以一种不依赖于数据包准确性的方式来编写程序。

视频流是使用UDP的一个很好的例子。

UDP是完美的VoIP地址，其中数据包必须发送不考虑其可靠性… 视频聊天是UDP的一个例子(你可以在任何视频聊天期间通过wireshark网络捕获来检查它)。 而且TCP不能与DNS和SNMP协议一起使用。 UDP没有任何开销，而TCP有很多开销

I work on a product that supports both UDP (IP) and TCP/IP communication between client and server. It started out with IPX over 15 years ago with IP support added 13 years ago. We added TCP/IP support 3 or 4 years ago. Wild guess coming up: The UDP to TCP code ratio is probably about 80/20. The product is a database server, so reliability is critical. We have to handle all of the issues imposed by UDP (packet loss, packet doubling, packet order, etc.) already mentioned in other answers. There are rarely any problems, but they do sometimes occur and so must be handled. The benefit to supporting UDP is that we are able to customize it a bit to our own usage and tweak a bit more performance out of it.

Every network is going to be different, but the UDP communication protocol is generally a little bit faster for us. The skeptical reader will rightly question whether we implemented everything correctly. Plus, what can you expect from a guy with a 2 digit rep? Nonetheless, I just now ran a test out of curiosity. The test read 1 million records (select * from sometable). I set the number of records to return with each individual client request to be 1, 10, and then 100 (three test runs with each protocol). The server was only two hops away over a 100Mbit LAN. The numbers seemed to agree with what others have found in the past (UDP is about 5% faster in most situations). The total times in milliseconds were as follows for this particular test:

1记录 IP: 390760 ms TCP: 416,903毫秒 10个记录 IP: 91,707 ms TCP: 95,662毫秒 100条记录 IP: 29,664 ms TCP: 30,968毫秒

IP和TCP传输的数据总量大致相同。我们在UDP通信方面有额外的开销，因为我们拥有一些与TCP/IP“免费”相同的东西(校验和，序列号等)。例如，Wireshark显示对下一组记录的请求在UDP中是80字节，在TCP中是84字节。

There are already many good answers here, but I would like to add one very important factor as well as a summary. UDP can achieve a much higher throughput with the correct tuning because it does not employ congestion control. Congestion control in TCP is very very important. It controls the rate and throughput of the connection in order to minimize network congestion by trying to estimate the current capacity of the connection. Even when packets are sent over very reliable links, such as in the core network, routers have limited size buffers. These buffers fill up to their capacity and packets are then dropped, and TCP notices this drop through the lack of a received acknowledgement, thereby throttling the speed of the connection to the estimation of the capacity. TCP also employs something called slow start, but the throughput (actually the congestion window) is slowly increased until packets are dropped, and is then lowered and slowly increased again until packets are dropped etc. This causes the TCP throughput to fluctuate. You can see this clearly when you download a large file.

因为UDP没有使用拥塞控制，它可以更快，并且经历更少的延迟，因为它不会寻求最大化缓冲区直到丢弃点，也就是说，UDP数据包在缓冲区中花费的时间更少，到达那里的速度更快，延迟更少。由于UDP不采用拥塞控制，但TCP采用拥塞控制，因此它可以从TCP中占用生成UDP流的容量。

UDP仍然容易受到拥塞和数据包丢失的影响，所以你的应用程序必须准备好以某种方式处理这些问题，可能使用重传或错误纠正代码。

结果是UDP可以:

Achieve higher throughput than TCP as long as the network drop rate is within limits that the application can handle. Deliver packets faster than TCP with less delay. Setup connections faster as there are no initial handshake to setup the connection Transmit multicast packets, whereas TCP have to use multiple connections. Transmit fixed size packets, whereas TCP transmit data in segments. If you transfer a UDP packet of 300 Bytes, you will receive 300 Bytes at the other end. With TCP, you may feed the sending socket 300 Bytes, but the receiver only reads 100 Bytes, and you have to figure out somehow that there are 200 more Bytes on the way. This is important if your application transmit fixed size messages, rather than a stream of bytes.

总之，UDP可以用于TCP可以使用的任何类型的应用程序，只要您还实现了适当的重传输机制。UDP可以非常快，有更少的延迟，在连接的基础上不受拥塞的影响，传输固定大小的数据报，并可用于组播。