Faster alternatives for Electron's IPC module

Question

I'm writing an Electron application which needs to send quite some data every ~25ms from the renderer to a separate Node process started in the main process with the native fork module.

The data looks like this: [{ x: int, y: int }, ...], with about 1000 points in it (and a bit more information than shown here for brevity).

I started using ipc.send in the renderer process but it has quite a serious performance penalty: 4.25ms for every ipc.send.

So I looked into starting a WebSocket with the ws npm package in the forked Node process, and sending the data over the WebSocket with JSON. This was a lot better. Even improved it further by using avsc instead of parsing to JSON (from ~4ms to ~1ms).

So the WebSocket solution is working great, but there's a problem: it needs to find a free port and go over the local network. In macOS this also triggers a dialog:

Do you want the application "x.app" to accept incoming network connections?

This dialog in combination with the trickiness of using the local network is something I'd like to avoid if possible.

My question is: does anyone know of a better solution to send data to other processes in Electron that doesn't go over the local network?

Answer 1

So the WebSocket solution is working great, but there's a problem: it needs to find a free port and go over the local network. In macOS this also triggers a dialog: ...

Are you using a loopback address? Loopback addresses should never require a network confirmation. In my local ws electron projects, I use 127.0.0.1:port instead of localhost, and this bypasses internet security dialogs entirely. You can use other 127.x.x.x addresses, as long as you add the appropriate loopback interface on Linux/MacOS. On Windows, 127.x.x.x are already added by default.

My question is: does anyone know of a better solution to send data to other processes in Electron that doesn't go over the local network?

Electron can either use IPC, RPC or network-based comm techs. You've already experienced IPC (RPC is very similar). The fastest, in my experience are the network-based techs. My experience was very similar to yours in that websockets blew the competition away. The network-based comm techs should never trigger LAN/WAN/ISP security measures unless they use LAN/WAN/ISP addresses.