Evaluating Performance of gRPC-Web vs grpc-gateway

This repository contains 2 equal APIs: using gRPC-Web with Envoy and using grpc-gateway. The goal is to run benchmarks for 2 approaches and compare them. APIs have 1 endpoint to ping. Benchmarks also include response parsing.

Requirements

• Docker
• docker-compose

Description

Using nodejs client and benchmarkify lib to benchmark.

Deployment model:

Flow definition:

• Direct request: call direct HTTP request to backend. Review spring-grpc-http to know more about this back. Result in this test will be seen like a baseline.
• Using grpc-gateway: call backend by using grpc-gateway.
• Using gRPC-Web: using gRPC-Web to call to backend. There are two options:
  • mode=grpcwebtext: Payload are base64-encoded.
  • mode=grpcweb: Payload are in the binary protobuf format.

Run test

Steps:

1. Start backend and gateways:

   docker-compose -f docker-compose-backend.yaml up

2. Wait services is started successfully

3. Configure test time by edit BENCHMARK_TIME in docker-compose-client.yaml.

4. Start client

   docker-compose -f docker-compose-client.yaml up

Results

As you see:

• Performance of gRPC-Web with text format and direct calling HTTP is nearly equal.
• grpc-gateway is more slower
• gRPC-Web with binary format is the fastest.

References

More detail in medium