Opening a socket is typically as fast or faster than opening a pipe.

Pipe issues:

• Have the overhead of starting a separate process. (you may or may not have this overhead when doing a TCP socket connection depending on if the server is forking or threading)

socket/TCP port issues:

• Most OSes have highly optimized TCP/IP stacks, generally much more optmized than the OSes core pipe processing functions. For today's applications network performance is typically much more important than pipe performance.
• localhost TCP/IP connections (where client and server are on the same host) do not go out "on the wire", they are typically highly optimized with direct memory-to-memory exchange of the data. Localhost network connections have practially 0 network overhead.

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