Re: Reliability of Java, sockets and TCP transmissions

From:

Nigel Wade <nmw@ion.le.ac.uk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 15:32:52 +0100

Message-ID:

<fe5huj$9iv$1@south.jnrs.ja.net>

Qu0ll wrote:

I am writing client and server components of an application that communicate
using Socket, ServerSocket and TCP. I would like to know just how reliable
this connection/protocol combination is in terms of transmission errors. So
far I have only been able to run the application where the client and server
are on the same local machine or separated by an intranet/LAN so I have no
results of an internet deployment to report but I have not encountered any
IO errors to this point.

So just how reliable are TCP and Java sockets over the actual internet? I
mean do I need to implement some kind of "advanced" protocol whereby check
sums are transmitted along with packets and the packet retransmitted if the
check sum is invalid or is all this handled by either the Java sockets or
the TCP protocol already?

That is handled by TCP/IP. Each IP datagram contains multiple checksums. There
are at least checksums for the IP header and for the TCP segment (header+data).
Other protocols layered on top of TCP/IP may add their own.

Sockets are very reliable. The Internet is built on them.

--
Nigel Wade, System Administrator, Space Plasma Physics Group,
University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK
E-mail : nmw@ion.le.ac.uk
Phone : +44 (0)116 2523548, Fax : +44 (0)116 2523555