Support for alternate transports

[Tratcher]

What would it take to substitute in an alternate transport between HttpClient and Kestrel for fast local machine proxying? E.g. can we replace Sockets with Named Pipes? How much faster would that be?

• Sockets
• Named Pipes
• Shared Memory
• Unix Domain Sockets

[samsp-msft]

On windows, sockets are apparently faster than named pipes - windows did specific work to optimize loopback scenarios.

Having a shared memory system similar to http.sys could be interesting, but the issue would be how to synchronize communications so they know where each side is at.

[adityamandaleeka]

Next steps for this are to make a minimal mockup of these options and then test performance.

Note that this supports work we are trying to do in .NET 7, so while it's not necessary for 1.1 it should be done relatively early in the 7 timeframe.

[adityamandaleeka]

We have a prototype for this but need benchmarks. cc: @sebastienros

[davidfowl]

I think one of the big reasons to support named pipes and unix domain sockets besides the potential speed improvement is the ability to avoid having to pick random ports for destinations (especially when trying to treat YARP as the gateway for many apps on the same compute).