I'm wondering if the mechanism used for sending signals between
postmaster processes on Win32 is much more heavyweight that is necessary.
Is there a reason not to call OpenThread on the target postmaster's
thread id, and then use QueueUserAPC to execute a 'signal handler'
method on it? (Or Terminate Thread for 'extreme' cases).
I don't think its entirely trivial because it would be better to cache
the handles for a short time rather than Open/Queue/Close each time, so
it may still be necessary to have a background thread that checks the
handles are not signalled and closes them if they are. But signal
delivery could be somewhat faster.
Haven't tried it - but I can't help thinking that the named pipe service
is a bit heavyweight.
James