Hard Numbers: HTTP/2 vs UDP Overlay for Agent Communication

Benchmarks across GCP us-east1 and europe-west1 (85ms RTT, 100 runs) show a UDP overlay called Pilot achieves 11x faster connection setup and 10x lower memory than HTTP/2 for multi-agent communication, while message latency is nearly identical for typical payload sizes. The critical advantage emerges behind NAT: HTTP/2 requires a relay proxy that adds significant latency and throughput loss, whereas Pilot hole-punches directly through NAT with minimal overhead.