Communication between processes

Question

I'm looking for some data to help me decide which would be the better/faster for communication between two independent processes on Linux:

• TCP
• Named Pipes

Which is worse: the system overhead for the pipes or the tcp stack overhead?

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Updated exact requirements:

• only local IPC needed
• will mostly be a lot of short messages
• no cross-platform needed, only Linux

Answer 1

In the past I've used local domain sockets for that sort of thing. My library determined whether the other process was local to the system or remote and used TCP/IP for remote communication and local domain sockets for local communication. The nice thing about this technique is that local/remote connections are transparent to the rest of the application.

Local domain sockets use the same mechanism as pipes for communication and don't have the TCP/IP stack overhead.