Why is Socket.BeginReceive losing packets from UDP?

Question

The following code waits for data over UDP. I have a test function that sends 1000 packets (datagrams?) of 500 bytes each. Each time I run the test function, the receiver gets only the first few dozen packets but drops the rest. I looked at the incoming network data using Wireshark and I see all 1000 packets are actually received, but just don't make it to may app's code.

Here is some of the relevant VB.NET 3.5 code:

Private _UdbBuffer As Byte()
Private _ReceiveSocket As Socket
Private _NumReceived As Integer = 0
Private _StopWaitHandle As AutoResetEvent

Private Sub UdpListen()
    _StopWaitHandle = New AutoResetEvent(False)
    _UdpEndPoint = New Net.IPEndPoint(Net.IPAddress.Any, UDP_PORT_NUM)

    _ReceiveSocket = New Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Dgram, ProtocolType.Udp)
    _ReceiveSocket.Bind(_UdpEndPoint)

    ReDim _UdbBuffer(10000)

    While Not _StopRequested
        Dim ir As IAsyncResult = _ReceiveSocket.BeginReceive(_UdbBuffer, 0, 10000, SocketFlags.None, AddressOf UdpReceive, Nothing)

        If Not _StopRequested Then
            Dim waitHandles() As WaitHandle = {_StopWaitHandle, ir.AsyncWaitHandle}
            If (WaitHandle.WaitAny(waitHandles) = 0) Then
                Exit While
            End If
        End If
    End While

    _ReceiveSocket.Close()
End Sub

Private Sub UdpReceive(ByVal ar As IAsyncResult)
    Dim len As Integer
    If ar.IsCompleted Then
        len = _ReceiveSocket.EndReceive(ar)
        Threading.Interlocked.Increment(_NumReceived)
        RaiseStatus("Got " & _NumReceived & " packets")
    End If
End Sub

I am sending the data as follows (not worried about the packet content for now):

For i as UShort = 0 to 999
   Dim b(500) as Byte
   _UdpClient.Send(b, b.Length)       
Next

If I add a small delay after each call to Send, more packets make it through; however since Wireshark says that they were all received anyways, it seems that the problem is in my receive code. I should mention that UdpListen is running on a separate thread.

Any idea why I am dropping packets? I also tried UdpClient.BeginReceive/EndReceive but had the same problem.

A second issue that bothers me is the global nature of the receive buffer when using Sockets and I am not sure if I don't process incoming packets quickly enough that the buffer will be overwritten. Not sure what to do about that just yet but I am open to suggestions.

Sep 26: Update

---

Based on the various, somewhat conflicting suggestions from replies to this and other posts, I made some changes to my code. Thanks to all who chimed in various bits; I now get all my packets from dial-up to Fast Ethernet. As you can see, it was my code at fault and not the fact that UDP drops packets (in fact I have not seen more than a tiny percentage of packets being dropped or out of order since my fixes).

Differences:

1) Replaced BeginReceive()/EndReceive() with BeginReceiveFrom()/EndReceiveFrom(). By itself this had no notible effect though.

2) Chaining BeginReceiveFrom() calls instead of waiting for the async handle to set. Not sure if any benefit here.

3) Explicitly set the Socket.ReceiveBufferSize to 500000 which is enough for 1 second worth of my data at Fast Ethernet speed. Turns out this is a different buffer than the one passed to BeginReceiveFrom(). This had the biggest benefit.

4) I also modified my send routine to wait a couple of ms after having sent a certain number of bytes to throttle based on expected bandwidth. This had a big benefit for my receiving code even though Wireshark said all my data still made it across even without this delay.

I did NOT end up using a separate processing thread because, as I understand it, each call to BeginReceiveFrom will invoke my callback on a new worker thread. This means that I can have more than one callback running at the same time. It also means that once I call BeginReceiveFrom I have time to do my stuff (as long as I don't take too long and exaust the available worker threads).

Private Sub StartUdpListen()
    _UdpEndPoint = New Net.IPEndPoint(Net.IPAddress.Any, UDP_PORT_NUM)
    _ReceiveSocket = New Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Dgram, ProtocolType.Udp)
    _ReceiveSocket.ReceiveBufferSize = 500000
    _ReceiveSocket.Bind(_UdpEndPoint)

    ReDim _Buffer(50000)

    _ReceiveSocket.BeginReceiveFrom(_Buffer, 0, _Buffer.Length, SocketFlags.None, _UdpEndPoint, AddressOf UdpReceive, Nothing)

End Sub

Private Sub UdpReceive(ByVal ar As IAsyncResult)
    Dim len As Integer = _ReceiveSocket.EndReceiveFrom(ar, _UdpEndPoint)
    Threading.Interlocked.Increment(udpreceived)

    Dim receiveBytes As Byte()
    ReDim receiveBytes(len - 1)
    System.Buffer.BlockCopy(_Buffer, 0, receiveBytes, 0, len)

    _ReceiveSocket.BeginReceiveFrom(_Buffer, 0, _UdbBuffer.Length, SocketFlags.None, _UdpEndPoint, AddressOf UdpReceive, Nothing)

    //' At this point, do what we need to do with the data in the receiveBytes buffer
    Trace.WriteLine("count=" & udpreceived)
End Sub

What is not shown above is the error handling and dealing with UDP data being out of order or missing.

I think this handles my issue, but if anybody still sees anything wrong with the above (or something I could do better) I would love to hear about it.

Answer 1

UDP can drop packets whenever it likes. In this case you could try setting a much larger socket receive buffer at the receiver to mitigate.

Answer 2

As said above, UDP is not a reliable protocol. It's a connectionless protocol which puts much less overhead on IP packets, than TCP does. UDP is quite good for many functions (including broadcast and multicast messages) but it can't be used for reliable message delivery. If the buffer is overloaded, network driver will just drop datagrams. If you need message-based communication with reliable delivery or you expect many messages to be sent, you can check our MsgConnect product (free open-source version available), which provides message-based data transfer over sockets as well as over UDP.