Does HTTP use UDP?

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From RFC 2616:

HTTP communication usually takes place
over TCP/IP connections. The
default port is TCP 80, but other
ports can be used. This does not
preclude HTTP from being implemented
on top of any other protocol on the
Internet, or on other networks. HTTP
only presumes a reliable transport;
any protocol that provides such
guarantees can be used; the mapping
of the HTTP/1.1 request and response
structures onto the transport data
units of the protocol in question is
outside the scope of this
specification.

So although it doesn’t explicitly say so, UDP is not used because it is not a “reliable transport”.

EDIT – more recently, the QUIC protocol (which is more strictly a pseudo-transport or a session layer protocol) does use UDP for carrying HTTP/2.0 traffic and much of Google’s traffic already uses this protocol. It’s currently progressing towards standardisation as HTTP/3.

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