IPC vs HTTP vs WebSocket: The Fastest Way to Talk to an Ethereum Node
Every Ethereum RPC call travels over a transport, and the transport you pick sets a floor on how fast that call can ever be. For a wallet showing a balance, the difference is invisible. For an arbitrage bot that reads a price and decides whether to act before the next block, it is the whole game. This post compares the three transports your node speaks, HTTP, WebSocket, and IPC, explains where their latency comes from, and gives you a benchmark you can run to see the gap on your own setup.