title: Sockets On Same Machine For Windows and Linux
body: <p>How efficient is it to use sockets when doing IPC as compared to named pipes and other methods on Windows and Linux?</p>
  
  <p>Right now, I have 4 separate apps on 4 separate boxes that need to communicate.  Two are .NET 3.5 applications running on Windows Server 2003 R2.  Two are Linux (Suse Linux 10).  They're not generally CPU bound.  The amount of traffic is not that large but its very important that it be low latency.  We're using sockets right now with nagle dis-abled and the sles10 slow start patch installed on the linux machines.</p>
  
  <p>How much of a speed boost do you think we would get by simply running the two windows apps on the same windows box and the two linux apps on the same linux box and making no code changes (ie still using sockets).   </p>
  
  <p>Will the OS's realize that the endpoints are on the same machine and know not to go out to the ethernet with the packets?  Will they packets still have to go through the whole networking stack?  How much faster it be if we took the time to change to named pipes or memory mapped files or something else?</p>