No packet loss in sending packets over local UDP sockets

Question

Is it normal that there will be no packet losses in a UDP client-server if both are on the same machine? I'm currently calculating packet loss by taking the difference between the bytes obtained from the sendto and recvfrom functions on the client side ? Am I doing something wrong ?

Answer 1

I would be very surprised if there was any packet loss in such a case. But on the other hand you use the wrong way to calculate any loss.

Remember that UDP is a packet oriented protocol, which means that what you send will be a packet, and what you receive will be a packet, and there will be no difference in the size of what you send and receive. If you send a 512-byte packet, the receiver will always receive the full 512-byte packet, or nothing at all.

That means you should count the number of times you call sendto , and compare the number of times that recvfrom returns with a packet.