gRPC vs REST Benchmark

This Benchmark measures communication efficiency between services through REST versus gRPC unary calls. The specific scenario is a BFF that consumes data in a given service.

Scenario

Unary RPC call

Performance best practices with gRPC

Client-side load balancing

With client-side load balancing, the client knows about endpoints. For each gRPC call, it selects a different endpoint to send the call to.

DnsResolverFactory

dns:///my-example-host

Reuse gRPC channels

gRPC client factory offers a centralized way to configure channels. It automatically reuses underlying channels.

Each call will require multiple network round-trips between the client and the server to create a new HTTP/2 connection:

1. Opening a socket
2. Establishing TCP connection
3. Negotiating TLS
4. Starting HTTP/2 connection
5. Making the gRPC call

Connection concurrency

HTTP/2 connections typically have a limit on the number of maximum concurrent streams on a connection at one time.

new SocketsHttpHandler
{
    EnableMultipleHttp2Connections = true
}

Keep alive pings

Having an existing HTTP/2 connection ready when an app resumes activity allows for the initial gRPC calls to be made quickly, without a delay caused by the connection being reestablished.

new SocketsHttpHandler
{
    PooledConnectionIdleTimeout = Timeout.InfiniteTimeSpan,
    KeepAlivePingDelay = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(60),
    KeepAlivePingTimeout = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(30),
}

Running

The respective ./docker-compose.yaml will provision all system dependencies, with the minimal resources needed for the benchmark:

docker-compose up -d

Run the benchmark

cd ./test

REST

docker run --network=internal --name k6 --rm -i grafana/k6 run - <usecase-rest-health.js

docker run --network=internal --name k6 --rm -i grafana/k6 run - <usecase-rest-retrieve.js

docker run --network=internal --name k6 --rm -i grafana/k6 run - <usecase-rest-submission.js

gRPC

docker run --network=internal --name k6 --rm -i grafana/k6 run - <usecase-grpc-health.js

docker run --network=internal --name k6 --rm -i grafana/k6 run - <usecase-grpc-retrieve.js

docker run --network=internal --name k6 --rm -i grafana/k6 run - <usecase-grpc-submission.js

References

• gRPC - A high performance, open source universal RPC framework
• Performance best practices with gRPC