Named pipe vs socket

In a fast local area network (LAN) environment, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Sockets and Named Pipes clients are comparable in terms of performance.
For named pipes, network communications are typically more interactive. A peer does not send data until another peer asks for it using a read command.
These can be very costly in a slow network and cause excessive network traffic, which in turn affects other network clients.
Data transmissions can also take advantage of TCP/IP Sockets performance enhancement mechanisms such as windowing, delayed acknowledgements, and so on, which can be very beneficial in a slow network.
In general, sockets are preferred in a slow LAN, WAN, or dial-up network, whereas named pipes can be a better choice when network speed is not the issue, as it offers more functionality, ease of use, and configuration options.
Two processes on one server can be configured to communicate using a named pipe instead of TCP/IP stack.
It is much faster, and does not load network resources.
For example a Web Server can communicate with the database directly using a named pipe, instead of using a localhost address or listening to some port.They take a very small amount of memory

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