How fast are Java Datagrams?

Overview

Following my article How fast are Java sockets, this article follows the same tests except for Datagrams which use UDP rather than TCP.

The timings

The tests are the same except Datagrams don't support busy waiting in Java 6 which hurts the Threaded Ping latency

UDP Pings per second 224 K/s
UDP Pings latency was 1/50/99%tile 4.1/4.2/4.7 us
Threaded UDP Pings per second 131 K/s
Threaded UDP Pings latency was 1/50/99%tile 9.8/11.0/33.2 us

Comparison

Test	Threaded	Throughput	Typical latency
Datagram Ping	no	224 K/s	4.2 μs
Socket Ping	no	170 K/s	5.8 μs
Datagram Ping	yes	131 K/s	11.0 μs
Socket Ping	yes	235 K/s	8.5 μs

The Code

DatagramPingTest.java