16 May
2003
16 May
'03
12:30 a.m.
On linux, which is faster, pipe, FIFO, or socket? What
about shared
memory - is it faster, and if so is it faster enough to warrant the
extra programming overhead?
depends what you want to do.
for communication that can wake another thread/process, shared memory
is not an option: there is no way to "wait" on shared memory. for
that, a pipe is notably faster than a tcp socket and a bit faster than
a unix socket. for actual data movement, shared memory beats
everything hands down since its zero copy.
linux pipes are about the fast IPC on any operating system so far,
although i have heard good things about futexes in kernel 2.5/2.6.
--p