CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netipc
FlySwat
FlySwat

Reputation: 175733

Inter-process communication in .NET

I have a core .NET application that needs to spawn an arbitrary number of subprocesses. These processes need to be able to access some form of state object in the core application.

What is the best technique? I'll be moving a large amount of data between processes (Bitmaps), so it needs to be fast.

Upvotes: 5

Views: 6234

Answers (5)

bryanbcook
bryanbcook

Reputation: 18363

WCF would probably fit the bill.

Here's a really good article on .NET Remoting for performing distributed intensive analysis. Though Remoting has been replaced with the WCF, the article is relevant and shows how to make the calls asynchronously, etc.

This article contrasts WCF to .NET Remoting—the key takeaway here shows that WCF throughput outperforms Remoting for small data, but it approaches Remoting performance as data size increases.

Upvotes: 5

Ryan
Ryan

Reputation: 8005

You can use .NET Remoting for inter-process communication (IPC) with IpcChannel. Otherwise you can search for shared memory wrappers and other IPC forms.

There is an MSDN article comparing WCF to a variety of methods including Remoting. However, unless I am reading the bar graph wrong, it shows Remoting to be the same or slightly better (unlike the other comment said).

There is also a blog post about WCF vs. Remoting. The blog post clearly shows Remoting is faster for binary objects and if you are passing Bitmaps (binary objects) then it seems Remoting or shared memory or other IPC option might be faster, although WCF might not be a bad choice anyway.

Upvotes: 3

Tim Jarvis
Tim Jarvis

Reputation: 18825

I'd be hesitant to move large data around. I'd be inclined to move pointers to large data around instead, i.e., memory mapped files.

Upvotes: 4

Jason Whitehorn
Jason Whitehorn

Reputation: 13685

If you truly need to have separate processes there is always named pipes which would perform quite well.

However, would a application domain boundary suffice? Then you could do object marshalling and things would be a lot easier. You application could work shared instances of the same object by using the MarshalByRefObject attribute.

Upvotes: 3

Fung
Fung

Reputation: 7790

I have similar requirements and am using Windows Communication Foundation to do that right now. My data sizes are probably a bit smaller though.

For reference I'm doing about 30-60 requests of about 5 KB-30 KB per second on a quad-core machine. WCF has been holding up quite well so far.

With WCF you have the added advantages of choosing a transport protocol and security mode that is suitable for your application.

Upvotes: 4

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