Comment by twic

I recently finished eight years at a place where everyone used multicast every day. It consistently worked very well (except for the time when the networks team just decided one of my groups was against policy and firewalled it without warning).

But this was because the IT people put effort into making it work well. They knew we needed multicast, so they made sure multicast worked. I have no idea what that involved, but presumably it means buying switches that can handle multicast reliably, and then configuring them properly, and then doing whatever host-level hardware selection and configuration is required.

In a previous job, we tried to use multicast having not done any groundwork. Just opened sockets and started sending. It did not go so well - fine at first, but then packets started to go missing, and we spent days debugging, and finding the obscure errors in our firewall config. In the end, we did get it working, but i would't have done it again. Multicast is a commitment, and we weren't ready to make it.