When Networking != IPC

To some people it stands firmly to reason that

Networking != IPC

This boggles the mind as they see the only way for two (or more!) application [living on the same machine] to communicate is via SHM and semaphores (aka. "mailbox & lock"). They say it's faster.

It is -- Stevens states in UNP that such an approach is 30% faster than AF_UNIX sockets.

However there are some minor drawbacks in this communication pattern:
a. it cannot be extended across hosts (for sockets it's transparent, endianess non-withstanding)
b. it is only half-duplex (no better than the venerable pipes/FIFOs) so you need two such message queues;
c. there is no notification of a peer's death (TCP/IP sockets can send keep-alives and these can be tuned);
d. the notification of a pending message is wasteful and at best awkward: one needs to dedicate a thread on the receiving side to block on the semaphore; this can be mitigated with pthread_cond_timedwait but it cannot be mixed with select-ing on sockets and you'll end up with a thread babysitting the mailboxes;
e. if there is more than one receiver process then the receivers must hunt down the messages addressed to them in the mailboxes; worse if one of the receivers gets bored and ends execution its messages are cleaned up by no-one (can I smell a DoS?);
f. the data that can be transported via mailboxes is limited by the size of the mailboxes and one may have to resort to fragmentation -- things can get very hairy at this point;
g. this pattern is not observable, i.e. one cannot use tcpdump to look at the packets going to and fro; one must build custom tools to observe the data flow;
h. depending on the type of SHM used (e.g. SysV SHM) the mailboxes and their contents may persist after the death of all the parties involved; this can be good if one wanted that of very bad if the server process must clean up at start-up.

To me such a socket-phobia is unexplainable (that is thinking with a UN*X programmer's mind). I do recall tho the contortions and the horrendous API and sad performance of Winsock. Yet have I mentioned that this whole mailbox/lock brouhaha has to happen on Linux?

-ulianov