title: Does Localhost perform better on windows?
body: <p>I have a .NET 3.5 server application that usually has about 8 clients.  I'm using <code>System.Net.Sockets</code> for all the networking.</p>
  
  <p>I've been told that if a client is running on the same box, it should use <code>localhost:&lt;port&gt;</code> or <code>127.0.0.1:&lt;port&gt;</code> instead of the machine's ip or name for better performance.  Several people at work have said that this skips some layers of the tcp stack.</p>
  
  <p>But I'm not able to see any performance difference at all in testing (timing how long it takes to get a ping packet from server to client using System.Diagnostics.Stopwatch).</p>
  
  <p>Should there really be better performance in theory?</p>