now, maybe i am mistaken... however, opening up a socket connection, no matter how simple, should be MARKEDLY slower than opening up a pipe, no matter what the situation. If you are opening up a socket to a host you have to deal with:

• TCP/IP overhead
• Network Transport Layer Overhead
• Communicational Latency
• The fact that you are communicating via external means, instead of the bus!

however, if you are opening up a pipe, to a process on the local machine then the situation is:

• there is NO TCP/IP overhead
• there is NO network layer overhead
• the communicational latency is the velocity at which the receiving process can aquire STDIN
• and you are communicating through memory and the bus, which have a MUCH greater bandwith and throughput than most any network connection!

if speed is your constraint, and you are attempting to maximize the throughput (here being messages per minute) I can not conceive of a way faster than communicating directly with sendmail through a pipe.

UPDATE: thanks to lhoward i have now learned that in modern operating systems, much to my suprise, the TCP subsystem has been optimized WAY better than I ever thought it would be, so, my entire coment above, should be disreguarded and i should be flogged for not having benchmarked in the first place :) keep the learning coming...

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