3 ms·
In 2018 Google claimed they were seeing 3 Petabytes weekly from DataChannel usage. This is from the 2018 KrankyGeek talk. For me personally I use DataChannels
by Sean-Der 6y ago
In 2018 Google claimed they were seeing 3 Petabytes weekly from DataChannel usage. This is from the 2018 KrankyGeek talk.
For me personally I use DataChannels pretty extensively for Teleoperation work. Also project like https://github.com/nurdism/neko https://github.com/nurdism/neko and https://github.com/giongto35/cloud-game https://github.com/giongto35/cloud-game are pretty compelling.
3 out of 8 ‘official use cases’ depend on it. https://www.w3.org/TR/webrtc-nv-use-cases/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webrtc-nv-use-cases/ as well.
Oh I also think great for E2E security. It is better to exchange metadata and keys via a DataChannel. If you push that stuff through signaling there is a good amount of information leaking.
- tptacek 6y agoThe question isn't why WebRTC has a DataChannel feature. It's why the DataChannel feature is as complicated as it is. Why not just use UDP? What's the return on all the complexity the protocol suite is spending?
- Sean-Der 6y agoAh, sorry missed the question :( I think just so users don’t have to solve the same problem themselves. SCTP gets you multiple streams and they can be ordered/reliable if you want. The congestion control is pretty impressive. You can jump the TSN forward if you send a bunch of data but lose one Datagram in the middle. Cool stuff like that.
- tptacek 6y agoThat's why literally every feature exists. The question is what the return on that feature is. If most applications don't get any value from the additional complexity of SCTP, and SCTP itself causes implementation flaws that harm users, the feature is not benign.