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I'm breaking a big application into several processes and I want each process to communicate with each other.

for now it's gonna be on the same server, but later several servers on same local network will have several processes that will need to communicate between each other. (means service on one server, with service on other server on same vpc)

so.. my raw options are tcp or unix sockets. I know that with Unix sockets can be useful only if you're on the same server. but we're thinking about writing our own implementation that on same server processes will communicate on unix sockets, and between servers that will communicate using tcp.

is it worth it ? of course tcp sockets are slower then unix sockets.. cause it doesn't go through the network and doesn't get wrapped with tcp related data. the question is by how much ? I couldn't find online proof of benchmarking between tcp and unix sockets. if tcp adds 3%-5% overhead that's cool, but can it be more then that ? I'd like to learn from experience of big projects.. of other people over the years, but didn't find anything relevant.

next...

our project is a NodejS project.

some people may say that I can use a broker for messages, so I tried using nats.io compared to node-ipc (https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-ipc) and I found out that node-ipc is 4 times faster but nats has the cool publish-subscribe feature... but performance is important.

so I have tons of options, no concrete decision.

any information regarding the issue would be greatly appreciated.

ufk
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1 Answers1

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The question is actually too broad to answer, but one answer for TCP vs unix domain sockets:

Architect your code, so that you can easily move between those if necessary. The programming model for these is basically the same (both are bidirectional streams of data), and the read/write APIs on OS level as well as in most frameworks is the same. This means e.g. in node both will inherit from the Readable/WriteableStream interfaces. That means the only code that you need to change for switching between those is the listener on the server side where you call the TCP accept APIs instead of the unix domain socket accept APIs and the other way around. You can even have your application accept both types of connections and later on handle them the same internally.

TCP support is always nice because it gives you some flexibility. With my last measurement the overhead was a little bit more (I think 30% versus TCP over loopback) but these are all micro benchmarks and it won't matter for most applications. Unix domain sockets might have an advantage if require some of their special functions, e.g. the ability to send file descriptors across them.

And regarding TCP vs NATS & Co: If you are not that experienced with network programming and protocol design it makes sense to use readymade IPC systems. That could be anything from HTTP to gRPC to Thrift. These are all point-to-point systems. NATS is different, since its a message broker and not RPC. It also requires an extra component in the middle. Whether this makes sense totally depends on the application.

Matthias247
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