IPC Mechanism

Named Pipes

Named pipes provide connection-oriented messaging by using pipes. Connection-oriented messaging requires that the communication occur over a virtual circuit and maintain reliable and sequential data transfer. A pipe is a portion of memory that can be used by one process to pass information to another. A pipe connects two processes so that the output of one can be used as input to the other. This technique is used for passing data between client and server.

A named pipe is a named, one-way or duplex pipe for communication between the pipe server and one or more pipe clients. All instances of a named pipe share the same pipe name, but each instance has its own buffers and handles, and provides a separate conduit for client/server communication.

In a fast local area network (LAN) environment, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Sockets and Named Pipes clients are comparable in terms of performance. However, the performance difference between the TCP/IP Sockets and Named Pipes clients becomes apparent with slower networks, such as across wide area networks (WANs) or dial-up networks. This is because of the different ways the interprocess communication (IPC) mechanisms communicate between peers.
For named pipes, network communications are typically more interactive. A peer does not send data until another peer asks for it using a read command. A network read typically involves a series of peek named pipes messages before it begins to read the data. These can be very costly in a slow network and cause excessive network traffic, which in turn affects other network clients.

Mailslots

Mailslots are a connectionless, high-level interprocess communication mechanism between networked computers, often used to locate and provide notification of services and computers. That is, mailslots are a broadcast service used for message delivery. The delivery of a message is not guaranteed, although the delivery rate on most networks is high.

A mailslot is a mechanism for one-way interprocess communications (IPC). Applications can store messages in a mailslot. The owner of the mailslot can retrieve messages that are stored there. These messages are typically sent over a network to either a specified computer or to all computers in a specified domain.

Mailslots function as a server-client interface. A server can create a Mailslot, and a client can write to it by name. 
Only the server can read the mailslot, as such mailslots represent a one-way communication mechanism. A server-client interface could consist of two processes communicating locally or across a network. Mailslots operate over the RPC protocol and work across all computers in the same network domain. Mailslots offer no confirmation that a message has been received. Mailslots are generally a good choice when one client process must broadcast a message to multiple server processes.