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C# Sockets vs Pipes

Asked 2012-06-04T20:42:51.613
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Currently I am working on a multi-process desktop application on Windows. This application will be a shrink wrapped application which will be deployed on client machines across the world. While we can have broad specifications for the machines - e.g. Windows XP SP3 with .Net 4.0 CF, we wont have control over them and we cant be too specific on their configuration - e.g. we cannot specify the machine must have a cuda 1.4 capable graphic processor etc.

Some of these processes are managed (.Net 4.0) and others are unmanaged (C++ Win32). The processes need to share data. The options I have evaluated to date are

  • Tcp sockets
  • Named Pipes

Pipes seem to perform a little better, but for our needs - performance from both are acceptable. And sockets give us the flexibility of crossing machine (and operating systems - we would like to support non-Microsoft OSes eventually) boundaries in the future hence our preference for going with sockets.

However - my major concern is this - If we use Tcp sockets - are we likely to run into issues with firewalls? Has anyone else deployed desktop applications / programs that use TCP for IPC and experienced issues? If so - what kind?

I know this is a fairly open ended question and I will be glad to rephrase. But I would really like to know what kind of potential problems we are likely to run into.

edit: To throw a little more light - we are only transporting a few PODs, ints, floats and strings. We have built a layer of abstraction that offers 2 paradigms - a request/response and subscription . The transport layer has been abstracted away and currently we have two implementations - pipe based and TCP based.

c# winapi sockets network-programming named-pipes
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If I correctly understand your requirements you need to communicate between processes running on the same computer. The processes probably run all in the same security context of the user which is logged on interactively.

In the case I should mention that there are different aspects of the solution. One problem is just to share the data between the applications. Another problem is the protocol which defines how the common data could be accessed and modified and how the communication between the processes take place. You can have for example one process which provide the data and all another subscribe the data. Another case: you can have common data which can be read or modified by all the applications and you need just be sure that nobody modify the shared data on the same time or nobody access the data during another modify it. Of cause it could be many other different communication scenarios.

Under the aspect I would suggest you two other options which you don't included in your question:

  • usage memory mapped files (see here and here)
  • usage of COM interface

Both ways can be good implemented in both .NET and unmanaged C++. The usage of memory mapped files is the best way from the performance point of view. If you create View which will be not associated with some physical file you will have just common memory which can be used between processes. You can use additionally an Mutex or Event to control that the memory will be not used at the same time by multiple applications.

In the most simple scenario you can even use #pragma data_seg in C++ to place some data in the n

answered 2012-06-05T12:09:28.393

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