We must implement a mechanism to avoid race conditions. A common mistake is to assume that we don’t need to synchronize the access to the file.
The name must be established by the process that creates the file.
Multiple processes can read and write on the same file by using the same name. It’s also important the fact that they are entirely managed by the operating system and all the processing is done directly against memory. The main advantage we gain by using memory mapped files is the performance of the write and read operations compared to a normal file. MMF is a common technique used for Inter Process Communication.Īnother great advantage of MMF is that we can create views to map specific parts of the file, so we don’t need to have the entire file in memory. The file is created by a process and can (but not necessarily) persists after the process ends. It allows to map a file to virtual memory, so any operation over that memory will be reflected to the file. A Memory Mapped File is a low level feature provided by the operating system. Net 4.0 Microsoft introduced a mechanism to work with Memory Mapped Files (MMF) on the System.IO.MemoryMappedFiles namespace.
