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
- Go 1.11
Run tests
Run benchmarks:
GO111MODULE=on go test -bench=. -benchmem
Results
goos: darwin
goarch: amd64
BenchmarkGRPCProtobuf-8 10000 117649 ns/op 7686 B/op 154 allocs/op
BenchmarkHTTPJSON-8 10000 105837 ns/op 8932 B/op 116 allocs/op
PASS
ok github.com/plutov/benchmark-grpc-protobuf-vs-http-json 4.340s
They are almost the same, HTTP+JSON is a bit faster and has less allocs/op.
CPU usage comparison
This will create an executable benchmark-grpc-protobuf-vs-http-json.test and the profile information will be stored in grpcprotobuf.cpu and httpjson.cpu:
GO111MODULE=on go test -bench=BenchmarkGRPCProtobuf -cpuprofile=grpcprotobuf.cpu
GO111MODULE=on go test -bench=BenchmarkHTTPJSON -cpuprofile=httpjson.cpu
Check CPU usage per approach using:
go tool pprof grpcprotobuf.cpu
go tool pprof httpjson.cpu
My results show that Protobuf consumes less ressources, around 30% less.
gRPC definition
- Install Go
- 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:. grpc-protobuf/proto/api.proto