C# Send Data Between Processes (w/ Memory Mapped File)

 

If you’re reading this right now you’re probably developing some application that has 2 or more processes and you want those processes to share some data with each other.

There are multiple ways to pass data between processes (IPC), each one being better in specific situations. This article will cover one method: using Memory Mapped Files (or mmf).

Advantages of Memory Mapped Files

The main advantage of this method is that data doesn’t need to be duplicated and sent to another process - it’s just shared (so you’re actually saving some memory and cpu cycles).

Basically, a memory mapped file is a space allocated on the user-mode portion of memory which is then made ‘public’ by the kernel, so other processes can access that region too - there’s no actual file on your disk. Each process can read whatever it’s stored in there; reading is fine, but when writing, try having a different offset for each process so you won’t run into the problem of having 2 processes writing on the same address.

To conclude, it is a good idea to use memory mapped files when:

• you need to pass large amounts of data
• some processes need to access shared data repeatedly
• your application has a lot of processes

Including non-nullable types

1:
While trying to implement this, I noticed that you can’t use MemoryMappedViewAccessor to read/write anything that isn’t a non-nullable type (string, class etc.), you get this error:

The type must be a non-nullable value type in order to use it as parameter ‘T’ in the generic type or method ‘System.IO.UnmanagedMemoryAccessor.Write(long, ref T)'

If you try to include something like a string (variable size) inside a struct and then pass that to the MemoryMappedViewAccessor, this error pops up:

The specified Type must be a struct containing no references.

In order to avoid these, we’ll use MemoryMappedViewStream which does the same thing, but this one takes as argument a byte[]. So we can take an object and serialize it to a byte array (w/ BinaryFormatter), write it in the memory, and when needed, read it again and deserialize it. Using this method you’re no longer limited to non-nullable types.

TL;DR:
goto 1;

Implementing this

To make this implementation…different…let’s also include an example: we have 2 processes (Proc1 and Proc2) and we want to send a Message object that contains 2 strings from Proc1 to Proc2.

Btw, the class Message looks like this:

[Serializable]  // mandatory
class Message
{
    public string title; 
    public string content;
}

Proc1 will create an instance of Message and write it in the shared memory:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    const int MMF_MAX_SIZE = 1024;  // allocated memory for this memory mapped file (bytes)
    const int MMF_VIEW_SIZE = 1024; // how many bytes of the allocated memory can this process access

    // creates the memory mapped file which allows 'Reading' and 'Writing'
    MemoryMappedFile mmf = MemoryMappedFile.CreateOrOpen("mmf1", MMF_MAX_SIZE, MemoryMappedFileAccess.ReadWrite);

    // creates a stream for this process, which allows it to write data from offset 0 to 1024 (whole memory)
    MemoryMappedViewStream mmvStream = mmf.CreateViewStream(0, MMF_VIEW_SIZE);

    // this is what we want to write to the memory mapped file
    Message message1 = new Message();
    message1.title = "test";
    message1.content = "hello world";

    // serialize the variable 'message1' and write it to the memory mapped file
    BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
    formatter.Serialize(mmvStream, message1);
    mmvStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); // sets the current position back to the beginning of the stream

    // the memory mapped file lives as long as this process is running
    while(true);
}

Proc2 will have to read the Message that Proc1 wrote. So it will look like this:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    const int MMF_MAX_SIZE = 1024;  // allocated memory for this memory mapped file (bytes)
    const int MMF_VIEW_SIZE = 1024; // how many bytes of the allocated memory can this process access

    // creates the memory mapped file
    MemoryMappedFile mmf = MemoryMappedFile.OpenExisting("mmf1");
    MemoryMappedViewStream mmvStream = mmf.CreateViewStream(0, MMF_VIEW_SIZE); // stream used to read data

    BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();

    // needed for deserialization
    byte[] buffer = new byte[MMF_VIEW_SIZE];

    Message message1;

    // reads every second what's in the shared memory
    while (mmvStream.CanRead)
    {
        // stores everything into this buffer
        mmvStream.Read(buffer, 0, MMF_VIEW_SIZE);

        // deserializes the buffer & prints the message
        message1 = (Message)formatter.Deserialize(new MemoryStream(buffer));
        Console.WriteLine(message1.title + "\n" + message1.content + "\n");

        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
    }
}

The end

That’s all…comments in the code should explain almost everything that needs to be explained. I know there are many tutorials related to this subject on the internet but most of them handle only the simple example with a structure containing ints - aka the example on msdn.