Assume you have mounted the TeX directory hierarchy from the department's central NFS server, galois, and you want to view a document describing how to use LaTeX. You start your editor, who first reads in the entire file. However, it would take too long to establish a TCP connection with galois, send the file, and release it again. Instead, a request is made to galois, who sends the file in a couple of UDP packets, which is much faster. However, UDP was not made to deal with packet loss or corruption. It is up to the application-- NFS in this case-- to take care of this.
Andrew Anderson
Thu Mar 7 23:22:06 EST 1996