Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

Using Memory-Mapped Files to Share Data Among Processes

Windows has always excelled at offering mechanisms that allow applications to share data and information quickly and easily. These mechanisms include RPC, COM, OLE, DDE, window messages (especially WM_COPYDATA), the Clipboard, mailslots, pipes, sockets, and so on. In Windows, the lowest-level mechanism for sharing data on a single machine is the memory-mapped file. That’s right, all of the mechanisms I mention ultimately use memory-mapped files to do their dirty work if all the processes communicating are on the same machine. If you require high-performance with low overhead, the memory-mapped file is the hands-down best mechanism to use.

This data sharing is accomplished by having two or ...