2017-09-11 12:48:57
good
Unix sockets are much faster
Experimentation with Unix sockets have shown that they are much faster. Well, much faster to
establish a new connection at least. 3-4 times faster. And in case of thousands of short connection
it seems the kernel has tremendous cleanup to do. Local TCP connections become much much slower.
Of course, Unix sockets are limited to
communication inside the server. But blackhole supports them transparently and can route
them across the network. The advantages are:

* Faster connections.
* Simpler security. If you can't see the file (the socket), you can't reach the service.
* With blackhole, containers can talk to each other using Unix sockets. Most services
do not need IP at all to communicate. Again, simpler security.

The disadvantage is that you lose the origin of the socket.

The whole truelies.news project was moved to Unix sockets for internal services.