As a comparison against traditional unix pipes (or even sockets), how does DBUS handle sending/receiving a lot of data? I always got the impression DBUS is more for notification style message passing, not actually for sending data, so you'd send a message saying "fetch the data from this socket" rather than "here's a bunch of data for you".

You can use DBus to call a remote procedure and pass the path of a temp file where the real data is.

(You can pass actual file descriptors too.)

That said DBus is pretty fast. Basically somewhere around 25-30% of TCP.

https://blogs.gnome.org/abustany/2010/05/20/ipc-performance-...