New named pipe protocol in SmartInspect 3.0

Also part of SmartInspect 3.0 is a new protocol for transferring log data to the Console over named pipes. Why did we add another live logging protocol to SmartInspect when there’s already the TCP protocol?

Named pipes have two significant advantages. They are way faster (factor 2-3 in our tests) and a (re-)connect attempt is just a call to CreateFile (which is a very fast operation). When combined with the reconnect option, this means you can have live logging enabled at all times and when you need to live-analyze your application, just open the Console and log messages start to appear immediately.

With TCP/IP, this scenario isn’t really possible since unsuccessful reconnect attempts are too slow and would influence the inspected application too much. For all these reasons, we have also decided to change the default connections string to using named pipes (with the reconnect option enabled).

One important thing to note is that the new pipe protocol supports local named pipes only. Because named pipes for connections to remote machines are emulated with TCP/IP by the OS anyway, we decided to limit the pipe protocol to local connections. So, since there are now two direct-transfer protocols to choose from, you just need to remember that the named pipe protocol is best used for local (live) logging and TCP for remote logging.

We are also very glad that we integrated named pipes into SmartInspect because this feature opens a whole lot of possibilities in the future (see also the SmartInspect Router in the next postings).