I am having a Web application sitting on IIS, and talking with [remote]Service-Machine. I am not sure whether to choose TCP or Http, as the main protocol.
more details:
I know the difference pretty well, but I am looking for a good benchmark, that shows how much faster is the TCP?
HTTP is a layer built ontop of the TCP layer to some what standardize data transmission. So naturally using TCP sockets will be less heavy than using HTTP. If performance is the only thing you care about then plain TCP is the best solution for you.
You may want to consider HTTP because of its ease of use and simplicity which ultimately reduces development time. If you are doing something that might be directly consumed by a browser (through an AJAX call) then you should use HTTP. For a non-modern browser to directly consume TCP connections without HTTP you would have to use Flash or Silverlight and this normally happens for rich content such as video and/or audio. However, many modern browsers now (as of 2013) support API's to access network, audio, and video resources directly via JavaScript. The only thing to consider is the usage rate of modern web browsers among your users; see caniuse.com for the latest info regarding browser compatibility.
As for benchmarks, this is the only thing I found. See page 5, it has the performance graph. Note that it doesn't really compare apples to apples since it compares the TCP/Binary data option with the HTTP/XML data option. Which begs the question: what kind of data are your services outputting? binary (video, audio, files) or text (JSON, XML, HTML)?
In general performance oriented system like those in the military or financial sectors will probably use plain TCP connections. Where as general web focused companies will opt to use HTTP and use IIS or Apache to host their services.
The question you really need an answer for is "will TCP or HTTP be faster for my application". The answer is that it depends on the nature of your application, and on the way that you use TCP and/or HTTP in your application. A generic HTTP vs TCP benchmark won't answer your question, because the chances are that the benchmark won't match your application behaviour.
In theory, an optimally designed / implemented solution using TCP will be faster than one that uses HTTP. But it may also be considerably more work to implement ... depending on the details of your application.
There are other issues that might affect your choice. For example, you are less likely to run into firewall issues if you use HTTP than if you use TCP on some random port. Another is that HTTP would make it easier to implement a load balancer between the IIS server and the backend systems.
Finally, at the end of the day it is probably more important that your system is secure, reliable, maintainable and (maybe) scalable than it is fast. A sensible strategy is to implement the simple version first, but have plans in your head for how to make it faster ... if the simple solution is too slow.
You could always benchmark it.
In general, if what you want to accomplish can be easily done over HTTP (i.e. the only reason you would otherwise think about using raw TCP is for a possible performance boost) you should probably just use HTTP. Sure, you can do socket programming, but why bother? Lots of people have spent a lot of time and effort building HTTP client libraries and servers, and they have spent waaaaaay more time optimizing and testing that code than you will ever be able to possibly spend on your TCP sockets. There are simply so many possible errors that you would have to handle, edge cases, and optimizations that can be done, that it is usually easier and safer to use a library function for HTTP.
Plus, the HTTP specs define all kinds of features (and clients/servers implement, which you get to use "for free", i.e. no extra implementation work) which makes any third-party interoperability that much easier. "Here is my URL, here are the rules for what you send, here are the rules for what I return..."
I have a Self Hosted Windows native C++ server application that I use the Casablanca C++ REST SDK code in. I can use any client C#, JavaScript, C++, cURL, basically anything that can send a POST, GET, PUT, DEL message can be used to send request messages to this self hosted windows app. Also I can use a plain browser address bar to do GET related requests using various parameters. Currently I only run this system on a private intranet so it is very fast - I haven't benchmark it against just doing raw TCP, but on a private intranet I doubt there would be even a few microseconds difference? For the convenience and ease of development and ability to expand to full blown internet app it's a dream come true. It is a dedicated system with a private protocol using small JSON packets so not certain if that fits your application needs or not? Another nice thing is this Windows application native C++ code could be ported fairly easily to run on Linux/MacOS as the Casablanca REST SDK is portable to those OSes.
