How does SUNRPC/UDP work?

[Chet Murthy]

I have some questions about SUNRPC (the UDP transport layer) that I can't
figure out the answers to from the documentation or source.

Perhaps somebody out there can answer them.

First, does SUNRPC/UDP allow arbitrary-length messages?  If not, what is
the maximum-length message?

Second, if SUNRPC/UDP does allow arbitrary (or long) length messages, does
it allow multiple messages to be read in at the same time, so that, for
example, if one server is receiving two UDP messages simultaneously, and
one of them client machines dies in the middle of the message, the server
can still read the rest of the other message - it doesn't hang waiting for
the message from the other client, and it doesn't need to wait for a
timeout.

Basically, I'm trying to find out if SUNRPC is suitable for operation in
an environment where machines can crash pretty often, without degrading
performance for those machines which are still left running.

Thanks in advance.

	murthy at cs.cornell.edu