How can I set the buffer size for the underneath Socket UDP?

Question

As we know for UDP receive, we use Socket.ReceiveFrom or UdpClient.receive

Socket.ReceiveFrom accept a byte array from you to put the udp data in.

UdpClient.receive returns directly a byte array where the data is

My question is that How to set the buffer size inside Socket. I think the OS maintains its own buffer for receive UDP data, right? for e.g., if a udp packet is sent to my machine, the OS will put it to a buffer and wait us to Socket.ReceiveFrom or UdpClient.receive, right?

How can I change the size of that internal buffer?

I have tried Socket.ReceiveBuffSize, it has no effect at all for UDP, and it clearly said that it is for TCP window. Also I have done a lot of experiments which proves Socket.ReceiveBufferSize is NOT for UDP.

Can anyone share some insights for UDP internal buffer???

I have seen some posts here, for e.g.,

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ncl/thread/c80ad765-b10f-4bca-917e-2959c9eb102a

Dave said that Socket.ReceiveBufferSize can set the internal buffer for UDP. I disagree.

The experiment I did is like this:

27 hosts send a 10KB udp packet to me within a LAN at the same time (at least almost). I have a while-loop to handle each of the packet. For each packet, I create a thread a handle it. I used UdpClient or Socket to receive the packets.

I lost about 50% of the packets. I think it is a burst of the UDP sending and I can't handle all of them in time.

This is why I want to increase the buffer size for UDP. say, if I change the buffer size to 1MB, then 27 * 10KB = 270KB data can be accepted in the buffer, right?

I tried changing Socket.ReceiveBufferSize to many many values, and it just does not have effects at all.

Any one can help?

Answer 1

I have had occasionally dropped packets, and I had success by increasing the buffer.

I used UdpClient, and on it's socket, I set a larger value than the default (which was 8192 bytes). This solved the problem for me.

In my scenario could clearly track that the smaller the size, the more often the drops, the larger, the fewer. I finally chose a value of 2^18 for my application.