has anyone noticed any differences in download/upload speeds when they've disabled UDP support? (Yes I know that some people here think it's pointless) but I run Peer Guardian whenever I download stuff on eMule.. if nothing else I can see when someone is scanning me... but it doesn't do any UDP filtering so I disabled it in eMule.

I don't think I've noticed any speed decrease or anything. Is UDP even used for ed2k or is it just a kad thing?

PeerGuardian is bad, using it with emule is even worse. I suggest using s proper firewall or at the very least upgrade to its 'replacement', Protowall. Then make sure your blocklist doesn't have many entries, because all of these safelists are a total crock, your just blocking out more perfectly legitimate ips than 'evil'.

As for UDP, as far as my understanding of this protocol goes, it is totally useless for transferring vital info, all that is sent is source details. For anything else you would get massive delays and corruption due to the nature of the codec. A UDP packet is 100% expendable in so far that it doesn't matter if it reaches its destination (it doesn't even bother checking) and the contents are easily sniffed by anything

So as far as filtering out udp, don't bother. Of course, block flood attacks (my router does that), but as for packets, the only info in them is information on sources, so blocking them will do nothing but block out sources for download

To answer the questions. Speed is not effected, source availability is. ed2k doesn't really implement udp as far as I know, emule most certainly does (to exchange info on spread, complete sources, and source info [and probably other expendable data]) and I think its intercal for Kad connectivity.

thanks for the info spud, i'll check out that protowall...

I actually have UDP turned off because that kind of traffic crashes my router lol. Stupid dodgy Netgear 814

UDP is used for source exchange (file info, QR, etc.) instead of TCP because it has less overhead. If you disable UDP usage, emule will stick to TCP instead.

At least I think it's so, but I was wrogn several times before.

edit: oops, saw that Spud wrote a lot and didn't care to read it. So yeah, we're both right.

yes, it has less overhead primarily because of TCP needs to establish a 'secure'/table connection for transferring. A UDP packet is just a 'heads up' kind of data sending.



Not exactly, sticking to TCP is a bit misleading, what I'd say is that you simply have TCP features, the others are lost ie. all of the source exchange will not work correctly. UDP is required to take full advantage of emules features such as source exchange, spread checking, and various statistics. If you block it, you loose these and you default on the standard, server gives you sources approach, which obviously takes away one of emules biggest advantages and KAD will be pretty useless / unworkable.