Either function will work for me to send a small event to other hardware. My goal is to minimize data usage for my Electron. I read that each publish takes about 128 bytes in overhead. How does this compare to sending a UDP packet without a reply to a PC or ESP2866? Using udp.sendpacket(). What is the overhead for a small integer of data?
Where's the source for this?
The difference would be:
DTLS header to encrypt your data (not available by default on UDP)
That saves you 27 bytes if you go for the UDP route where you have to host the server and make it publicly available. Using Particle.publish() works out of the box 
1 Like
And another 60 bytes saved if there is no reply? So only 1/4 overhead?
Sounds right 
particle.variable() overhead?
How many bytes overhead when you register a variable using particle.variable()?
I guess data usage is minimal if the GET http is only called rarely to retrieve the value?
In this case, it doesn’t matter what the overhead is?