This library intents to provide a **smooth, resilient, ordered, error-checked and anonymous** delivery of streams over **UDP** packets, it has been battle-tested with opensource project [kcptun](https://github.com/xtaci/kcptun). Millions of devices(from low-end MIPS routers to high-end servers) have deployed **kcp-go** powered program in a variety of forms like **online games, live broadcasting, file synchronization and network acceleration**.
1. Handles **>5K concurrent connections** on a single commodity server.
1. Compatible with [net.Conn](https://golang.org/pkg/net/#Conn) and [net.Listener](https://golang.org/pkg/net/#Listener), a drop-in replacement for [net.TCPConn](https://golang.org/pkg/net/#TCPConn).
1. [FEC(Forward Error Correction)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_error_correction) Support with [Reed-Solomon Codes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_correction)
1. Packet level encryption support with [AES](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Encryption_Standard), [TEA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Encryption_Algorithm), [3DES](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_DES), [Blowfish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowfish_(cipher)), [Cast5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAST-128), [Salsa20]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salsa20), etc. in [CFB](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Cipher_Feedback_.28CFB.29) mode, which generates completely anonymous packet.
1. Only **A fixed number of goroutines** will be created for the entire server application, costs in **context switch** between goroutines have been taken into consideration.
1. Compatible with [skywind3000's](https://github.com/skywind3000) C version with various improvements.
1. Platform-dependent optimizations: [sendmmsg](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sendmmsg.2.html) and [recvmmsg](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/recvmmsg.2.html) were expoloited for linux.
List structure introduces **heavy cache misses** compared to slice which owns better **locality**, 5000 connections with 32 window size and 20ms interval will cost 6us/0.03%(cpu) using slice, and 8.7ms/43.5%(cpu) for list for each `kcp.flush()`.
Timing is **critical** to **RTT estimator**, inaccurate timing leads to false retransmissions in KCP, but calling `time.Now()` costs 42 cycles(10.5ns on 4GHz CPU, 15.6ns on my MacBook Pro 2.7GHz).
In kcp-go, after each `kcp.output()` function call, current clock time will be updated upon return, and for a single `kcp.flush()` operation, current time will be queried from system once. For most of the time, 5000 connections costs 5000 * 15.6ns = 78us(a fixed cost while no packet needs to be sent), as for 10MB/s data transfering with 1400 MTU, `kcp.output()` will be called around 7500 times and costs 117us for `time.Now()` in **every second**.
Primary memory allocation are done from a global buffer pool xmit.Buf, in kcp-go, when we need to allocate some bytes, we can get from that pool, and a fixed-capacity 1500 bytes(mtuLimit) will be returned, the rx queue, tx queue and fec queue all receive bytes from there, and they will return the bytes to the pool after using to prevent unnecessary zer0ing of bytes. The pool mechanism maintained a high watermark for slice objects, these in-flight objects from the pool will survive from the perodical garbage collection, meanwhile the pool kept the ability to return the memory to runtime if in idle.
4. Information security
kcp-go is shipped with builtin packet encryption powered by various block encryption algorithms and works in [Cipher Feedback Mode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_cipher_mode_of_operation#Cipher_Feedback_(CFB)), for each packet to be sent, the encryption process will start from encrypting a [nonce](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_nonce) from the [system entropy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random), so encryption to same plaintexts never leads to a same ciphertexts thereafter.
The contents of the packets are completely anonymous with encryption, including the headers(FEC,KCP), checksums and contents. Note that, no matter which encryption method you choose on you upper layer, if you disable encryption, the transmit will be insecure somehow, since the header is ***PLAINTEXT*** to everyone it would be susceptible to header tampering, such as jamming the *sliding window size*, *round-trip time*, *FEC property* and *checksums*. ```AES-128``` is suggested for minimal encryption since modern CPUs are shipped with [AES-NI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_instruction_set) instructions and performs even better than `salsa20`(check the table above).
Other possible attacks to kcp-go includes: a) [traffic analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis), dataflow on specific websites may have pattern while interchanging data, but this type of eavesdropping has been mitigated by adapting [smux](https://github.com/xtaci/smux) to mix data streams so as to introduce noises, perfect solution to this has not appeared yet, theroretically by shuffling/mixing messages on larger scale network may mitigate this problem. b) [replay attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replay_attack), since the asymmetrical encryption has not been introduced into kcp-go for some reason, capturing the packets and replay them on a different machine is possible, (notice: hijacking the session and decrypting the contents is still *impossible*), so upper layers should contain a asymmetrical encryption system to guarantee the authenticity of each message(to process message exactly once), such as HTTPS/OpenSSL/LibreSSL, only by signing the requests with private keys can eliminate this type of attack.
Control messages like **SYN/FIN/RST** in TCP **are not defined** in KCP, you need some **keepalive/heartbeat mechanism** in the application-level. A real world example is to use some **multiplexing** protocol over session, such as [smux](https://github.com/xtaci/smux)(with embedded keepalive mechanism), see [kcptun](https://github.com/xtaci/kcptun) for example.
A: A standalone `agent` or `gate` server for running kcp-go is suggested, not only for CPU utilization, but also important to the **precision** of RTT measurements(timing) which indirectly affects retransmission. By increasing update `interval` with `SetNoDelay` like `conn.SetNoDelay(1, 40, 1, 1)` will dramatically reduce system load, but lower the performance.
A: Forward error correction is critical to long-distance transmission, because a packet loss will lead to a huge penalty in time. And for the complicated packet routing network in modern world, round-trip time based loss check will not always be efficient, the big deviation of RTT samples in the long way usually leads to a larger RTO value in typical rtt estimator, which in other words, slows down the transmission.
Q: Should I enable encryption?
A: Yes, for the safety of protocol, even if the upper layer has encrypted.
