gRPC+Protobuf or JSON+HTTP?

This repository contains 2 equal APIs: gRPC using Protobuf and JSON over HTTP. The goal is to run benchmarks for 2 approaches and compare them. APIs have 1 endpoint to create user, containing validation of request. Request, validation and response are the same in 2 packages, so we're benchmarking only mechanism itself. Benchmarks also include response parsing.

Requirements

git remote add origin https://github.com/mondora/benchmark-grpc-protobuf.git

• Go 1.14.2

Run tests

Run benchmarks:

go test -bench=.
go test -bench=. -benchmem

Results

goos: darwin
goarch: amd64
BenchmarkGRPCProtobuf-8                    11379            103889 ns/op            9467 B/op        192 allocs/op
BenchmarkGzippedGRPCProtobuf-8              5190            228779 ns/op           19147 B/op        209 allocs/op
BenchmarkHTTPJSON-8                        10000            107691 ns/op            8757 B/op        115 allocs/op

PASS
ok      benchmark-grpc-protobuf  7.370s

They are almost the same (gRPC and HTTP+JSON). gZipped gRPC request is slower.

CPU usage comparison

This will create an executable benchmark-grpc-protobuf.test and the profile information will be stored in grpcprotobuf.cpu (+gzipped) and httpjson.cpu:

go test -bench=BenchmarkGRPCProtobuf -cpuprofile=grpcprotobuf.cpu
go test -bench=BenchmarkGzippedGRPCProtobuf -cpuprofile=grpcgzippedprotobuf.cpu
go test -bench=BenchmarkHTTPJSON -cpuprofile=httpjson.cpu

Check CPU usage per approach using:

go tool pprof grpcprotobuf.cpu
go tool pprof grpcgzippedprotobuf.cpu
go tool pprof httpjson.cpu

gRPC definition

• Install Protocol Buffers
• Install protoc plugin: go get github.com/golang/protobuf/proto github.com/golang/protobuf/protoc-gen-go

protoc --go_out=plugins=grpc:. proto/api.proto