Why does NFS use UDP by default?
I'm sure there's some ancient legacy reason for it, but what is it? It seems like a service that's geared towards reliable data delivery. NFS was originally designed to be used on a LAN where loss rates are very low. UDP is faster, and has less overhead NFS is stateless, so it's simple for clients to retry Note that NFS v3+ can use TCP. UDP is the default for NFSv2 (which nobody should really use these days) but NFSv3 use TCP by default. TCP mounts are more reliable and you know you have a network problem much faster than with UDP. My guess is that it's probably for legacy (historical) reasons