Benchmark testing the latency and throughput of MessagePort vs IpcRenderer for inter-process communication.
- Install
pnpm i
- Start
pnpm start
- Wait for all three tests to complete (a few mins)
Three tests will run and each will produce a chart. The format of the names on the left side of each chart is [HowTheMessageWasSent]#[MessageFormat]#[SizeOfMessage]. op/s is the number of operations the test ran per second (higher is better). Mb/s is the number of Megabytes transferred per second.
The first test measures the time it takes to send a binary (UInt8Array) message round-trip (mimicking ipcRenderer.invoke, i.e., Process A -> Process B -> Process A).
The test is repeated a number of times until an accurate measure is obtained.
Results: MessagePort is almost 40% faster than IpcRenderer for large binary payloads, but only 5-10% faster for smaller payloads.
The second test is the same as the first but the payload type is a random JSON object instead of UInt8Array.
Results: MessagePort is significantly faster than IpcRenderer for all JSON payloads. The larger the payload, the greater the difference (more than twice as fast for payloads of 500 kb).
Side Note: Notice how for the same sized payload (26 Kb), the MessagePort is about 30% faster sending binary rather than JSON. But for IpcRenderer, the difference is much greater — IpcRenderer is more than twice as fast sending binary data than JSON.
The last test measures how fast the backend can send data to the frontend one-way (i.e., Backend -> Renderer). All data is split up into 1 MB UInt8Array chunks. I am not including the time it takes to create the data. Only the time it takes to go from A to B.
MessagePortOptimized - takes advantage of PostMessage API to transfer the binary data instead of copying it.
Results: MessagePort is ~50% faster than IpcRenderer at sending binary data from backend to frontend. MessagePortOptimized of course is the fastest.
Side Note: Notice how the loading spinner seems to stutter a bit during the test, thats because the main process gets blocked while creating the data for the IpcRenderer.