Ah thanks, it must be something like that, though later on in the FAQ there they also say:
> ØMQ gets you more throughput than TCP has using intelligent batching algorithms.
yes, intelligent, sounds like a good idea. ;-)
EDIT: ok here's a little more detail as to what they mean by that in the next FAQ entry:
> ØMQ batches messages in opportunistic manner. Rather than waiting for a predefined number of messages and/or predefined time interval, it sends all the messages available at the moment in one go. Imagine the network interface card is busy sending data. Once it is ready to send more data it asks ØMQ for new messages. ØMQ sends all the messages available at the moment. Does it harm the latency of the first message in the batch? No. The message won't be sent earlier anyway because the networking card was busy. On the contrary, latency of subsequent messages will be improved because sending single batch to the card is faster then sending lot of small messages. On the other hand, if network card isn't busy, the message is sent straight away without waiting for following messages. Thus it'll have the best possible latency.
> We are working on delivering ØMQ over alternative networking stacks, thus having advantage of features like kernel bypass, avoiding TCP/IP overhead, using high-performance networking hardware etc. That way we can get the latency as low as 10 microseconds.
ZeroMQ's website itself makes no claim that they're faster than TCP: http://www.zeromq.org/area:faq, under: