IPC speed and compare

Question

I am trying to implement a real-time application which involves IPC across different modules. The modules are doing some data intensive processing. I am using message queue as the backbone(Activemq) for IPC in the prototype, which is easy(considering I am a totally IPC newbie), but it's very very slow.

Here is my situation:

• I have isolated the IPC part so that I could change it other ways in future.
• I have 3 weeks to implement another faster version. ;-(
• IPC should be fast, but also comparatively easy to pick up

I have been looking into different IPC approaches: socket, pipe, shared memory. However, I have no experience in IPC, and there is definitely no way I could fail this demo in 3 weeks... Which IPC will be the safe way to start with?

Thanks. Lily

Answer 1

Best results you'll get with Shared Memory solution.

Recently I met with the same IPC benchmarking. And I think my results will be useful for all who want to compare IPC performance.

Pipe benchmark:

Message size:       128
Message count:      1000000
Total duration:     27367.454 ms
Average duration:   27.319 us
Minimum duration:   5.888 us
Maximum duration:   15763.712 us
Standard deviation: 26.664 us
Message rate:       36539 msg/s

FIFOs (named pipes) benchmark:

Message size:       128
Message count:      1000000
Total duration:     38100.093 ms
Average duration:   38.025 us
Minimum duration:   6.656 us
Maximum duration:   27415.040 us
Standard deviation: 91.614 us
Message rate:       26246 msg/s

Message Queues benchmark:

Message size:       128
Message count:      1000000
Total duration:     14723.159 ms
Average duration:   14.675 us
Minimum duration:   3.840 us
Maximum duration:   17437.184 us
Standard deviation: 53.615 us
Message rate:       67920 msg/s

Shared Memory benchmark:

Message size:       128
Message count:      1000000
Total duration:     261.650 ms
Average duration:   0.238 us
Minimum duration:   0.000 us
Maximum duration:   10092.032 us
Standard deviation: 22.095 us
Message rate:       3821893 msg/s

TCP sockets benchmark:

Message size:       128
Message count:      1000000
Total duration:     44477.257 ms
Average duration:   44.391 us
Minimum duration:   11.520 us
Maximum duration:   15863.296 us
Standard deviation: 44.905 us
Message rate:       22483 msg/s

Unix domain sockets benchmark:

Message size:       128
Message count:      1000000
Total duration:     24579.846 ms
Average duration:   24.531 us
Minimum duration:   2.560 us
Maximum duration:   15932.928 us
Standard deviation: 37.854 us
Message rate:       40683 msg/s

ZeroMQ benchmark:

Message size:       128
Message count:      1000000
Total duration:     64872.327 ms
Average duration:   64.808 us
Minimum duration:   23.552 us
Maximum duration:   16443.392 us
Standard deviation: 133.483 us
Message rate:       15414 msg/s