Does anyone know of a fast bus for local messaging between applications on the same machine?

Question

I'm looking for a pub/sub mechanism that can be used by .NET applications running on the same machine (a mixture of different app domains and processes). I'd really rather avoid having to run a separate service or anything that requires too much configuration. Obviously I'd like to keep the memory and cpu load to a minimum too.

Specifically I want to broadcast high volumes of small messages to subscribers on the same host. So I want a bus (e.g. MSMQ or NServiceBus) - but I don't want the overhead of full network support (it only needs local named pipes) or the cost and complexity of an enterprise bus.

Answer 1

Named pipes is the fastest way to do local process interaction.

Reference:
NamedPipeServerStream
NamedPipeClientStream
Choosing a transport

Important reading:
Don't get in a deadlock

Answer 2

If you just want to send a signal from one process to other that some portion of work is done, the most lightweight solution could be a mutex.

Answer 3

I would guess that configured properly, MSMQ + NServiceBus would be able to achieve your desired throughput on a single machine. There is an [Express] attribute that will cause your messages to not be written to disk. If performance is adequate, you are much better off using a high-level framework like this than rolling your own.

Answer 4

Mailslots
Memory Mapped files
Named Pipes
LPC

All on Windows

Answer 5

This isn't my definitive solution, but one solution that has come up is 0MQ which offers a reliable pub/sub mode and has relatively low requirements for configuration and infrastructure. The downside is that it is relatively low level (the .NET API is a wrapper around the native C code) - so I will need to implement all the serialisation and so on.

I'll post back when I've had time to experiment and come to a conclusion.