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Everyone seems to say named pipes are faster than sockets IPC. How much faster are they? I would prefer to use sockets because they can do two-way communication and are very flexible but will choose speed over flexibility if it is by considerable amount.
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So, in relative terms, named pipes are approximately 30% faster than UNIX sockets with a block size of 100 bytes.
There are no concepts of packets within pipes. sockets packetize communication using IPv4 or IPv6; that communication can extend beyond localhost. Note that different endpoints of a socket can share the same IP address; however, they must listen on different TCP / UDP ports to do so.
In computing, a named pipe (also known as a FIFO for its behavior) is an extension to the traditional pipe concept on Unix and Unix-like systems, and is one of the methods of inter-process communication (IPC).
This method is pretty fast and works on Windows 8 Developer Preview, too (see my benchmark). Any kind of data can be transported this way, by serializing it on the sender, and deserializing it on the receiver side. It's also simple to implement sender and receiver message queues, to make the communication asynchronous.
Best results you'll get with Shared Memory solution.
Named pipes are only 16% better than TCP sockets.
Results are get with IPC benchmarking:
Pipe benchmark:
Message size: 128
Message count: 1000000
Total duration: 27367.454 ms
Average duration: 27.319 us
Minimum duration: 5.888 us
Maximum duration: 15763.712 us
Standard deviation: 26.664 us
Message rate: 36539 msg/s
FIFOs (named pipes) benchmark:
Message size: 128
Message count: 1000000
Total duration: 38100.093 ms
Average duration: 38.025 us
Minimum duration: 6.656 us
Maximum duration: 27415.040 us
Standard deviation: 91.614 us
Message rate: 26246 msg/s
Message Queue benchmark:
Message size: 128
Message count: 1000000
Total duration: 14723.159 ms
Average duration: 14.675 us
Minimum duration: 3.840 us
Maximum duration: 17437.184 us
Standard deviation: 53.615 us
Message rate: 67920 msg/s
Shared Memory benchmark:
Message size: 128
Message count: 1000000
Total duration: 261.650 ms
Average duration: 0.238 us
Minimum duration: 0.000 us
Maximum duration: 10092.032 us
Standard deviation: 22.095 us
Message rate: 3821893 msg/s
TCP sockets benchmark:
Message size: 128
Message count: 1000000
Total duration: 44477.257 ms
Average duration: 44.391 us
Minimum duration: 11.520 us
Maximum duration: 15863.296 us
Standard deviation: 44.905 us
Message rate: 22483 msg/s
Unix domain sockets benchmark:
Message size: 128
Message count: 1000000
Total duration: 24579.846 ms
Average duration: 24.531 us
Minimum duration: 2.560 us
Maximum duration: 15932.928 us
Standard deviation: 37.854 us
Message rate: 40683 msg/s
ZeroMQ benchmark:
Message size: 128
Message count: 1000000
Total duration: 64872.327 ms
Average duration: 64.808 us
Minimum duration: 23.552 us
Maximum duration: 16443.392 us
Standard deviation: 133.483 us
Message rate: 15414 msg/s
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