UDP
A fast, connectionless way to send data over the internet without guaranteeing delivery or order, trading reliability for low latency.
Full Definition
User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a transport-layer protocol that sends data packets without establishing a connection or guaranteeing delivery, order, or error correction. Applications send datagrams and accept that some may arrive out of order or not at all. This makes UDP faster and lower-latency than TCP, ideal for real-time applications: video streaming, online gaming, VoIP, and DNS queries. In the proxy world, SOCKS5 is one of the few proxy protocols that supports UDP forwarding. QUIC (which powers HTTP/3) runs over UDP, and many modern VPN protocols (WireGuard, OpenVPN's default mode) also use UDP for better performance.
