Fully managed shared memory .NET implementations?

Question

I'm looking for free, fully-managed implementations of shared memory for .NET (P/Invoke is acceptable, mixed C++/CLI is not).

Solution 1

Sounds like you are looking for Memory-Mapped Files, which are supported in the .NET 4.0 BCL.

Starting with the .NET Framework version 4, you can use managed code to access memory-mapped files in the same way that native Windows functions access memory-mapped files, as described in Managing Memory-Mapped Files in Win32 in the MSDN Library

Solution 2

Well, the .NET framework is free, recommended. .NET 4.0 supports the System.IO.MemoryMappedFiles namespace classes. Shared memory is a fairly drastic impedance mismatch with the notion of a garbage collector, that's why it took a while. Unless you use pointers, copying from the GC heap to the MMF view is inevitable.

The other IPC mechanisms use shared memory too, it just isn't explicit since its built into the kernel. This all runs at roughly the same speed, a microsecond to setup the mapping and then just the bus bandwidth to do the memory-to-memory copy. Five gigabytes per second is the slowest you'll run into.

Comments

[em70]

Looks like those and a shared mutex are gonna do the trick. After all I just need to pass some doubles with extremely low latency across two processes for some financial stuff. Thanks

[em70]

Thanks for the useful performance info, +1 :)