Named pipes vs. UDP for IPC on Windows

问题:

Why Named Pipes are preferable for IPC (Inter Process Comunication) on local Windows machine over UDP? Or UDP sometimes might be somewhere better?

回答1:

UDP packets even on localhost can be lost. Also, as UDP is datagram-based and has no guaranteed delivery, it's hard to transfer larger data blocks. Finally, UDP on localhost is sometimes blocked by browsers. In general, UDP is usually not even considered for single-computer IPC.

On Windows I recommend memory-mapped files + synchronization primitives as the fastest and probably the easiest method. Named pipes usually work well when you manage them to work, but I see lots of questions here regarding how to make the named pipes work at all (and I have yet to see a single complaint regarding MMFs).

We have a product, MsgConnect, which provides socket-, UDP- and MMF-based transports, suitable for IPC locally or across network, so I have practical experience with this topic. Named pipes were considered for support but then the idea was discarded in favor of other mechanisms.