What are common UDP usecases?

Question

Can anyone tell be where to use the UDP protocol except live streaming of music/video? What are default usecases for UDP?

Answer 1

Anything else where you need performance but can survive if a packet gets lost along the way. Multiplayer games come to mind, for example.

Answer 2

UDP is stateless and is good for applications that have large numbers of clients connecting to a server such as time servers or DNS. The fact that no connection has to established and maintained reduces the memory required by the server. There is no handshaking involved and so this reduces the traffic on the network. On the downside, if the information transferred requires multiple packets there is no transmission control to ensure that all packets arrive and in the correct order - but in games packets lost are probably better than late or disordered.