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The only thing holding back gRPC is JS web support. If it had that it'd be time to drop swagger completely. As it is you need to go protobuf -> swagger -> js li

by brango 9y ago

The only thing holding back gRPC is JS web support. If it had that it'd be time to drop swagger completely. As it is you need to go protobuf -> swagger -> js lib, but it's cumbersome and doesn't work 100% (e.g adding auth keys, etc.). Will there be any progress on JS web, or can it just not be done at all with HTTP1? Even a subset of features for basic GET/POST would be fine...

buckhx 9y ago
We've been using grpc-web from Improbable successfully for internal services. I'm working on a more production scale application soon that I'm planning on leveraging grpc-web for. The biggest missing feature is client side streaming support which is hamstrung the new wgfetch/streams API, but I feel confident in finding solutions for situations that generally require client side streaming. https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web
- brango 9y ago
  I hadn't seen that. Thanks!
- simonhorlick 9y ago
  We've just gone live with a grpc-web based application. It's still early days and there are some rough edges, but it's an absolute joy to use and the amount of time we've saved is crazy.
cshenton 9y ago
There's also the fact that, for high level languages like python, the gRPC server has lower throughput than available python http servers. Even with the overhead of parsing http and whatever message format you're sending over it.
- weberc2 9y ago
  This is surprising given that there Python implementation is apparently C. Anyway I can't imagine this is the bottleneck in any nontrivial Python app.
  - papercruncher 9y ago
    There's a known issue that's been open for a while, where a Python server could get stuck consuming 100% of a single CPU core, see https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/9688 https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/9688
    - weberc2 9y ago
      Granted, but this is clearly a bug in a pathological case; it's not consistent bad performance.
phamilton 9y ago
I'd say load balancing is still a big gRPC hurdle. See https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/load-balancing.md https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/load-balancing.... for the current official stance on load balancing. It's pretty convoluted IMO.
- brango 9y ago
  IIRC on K8s there are some gRPC-aware load balancers, possibly Envoy, I forget.
- YZF 9y ago
  I agree. You kind of have to roll your own for every language you use which is odd. And retries. Hopefully some more standard way of handling this will emerge. EDIT: I enjoyed the GopherCon talk... I don't think the video is up yet but when it is I recommend watching...
- leastangle 9y ago
  I like the approach of custom name resolver though. Pretty straight forward to build one e.g. backed by Consul.
morecoffee 9y ago
Surprisingly, the reason why gRPC JS web support doesn't exist is because of Chrome. There is currently no way to access the HTTP trailers from Javascript. gRPC depends on trailers to tell when an RPC is complete when doing bidirectional streaming. Please tell browser devs to provide access to them! They have been part of the HTTP spec for years. Only recently have browsers entertained the idea: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339096 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339096 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168232 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168232 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=691599 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=691599 https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/10939642/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...

by brango 9y ago

buckhx 9y ago

We've been using grpc-web from Improbable successfully for internal services. I'm working on a more production scale application soon that I'm planning on leveraging grpc-web for. The biggest missing feature is client side streaming support which is hamstrung the new wgfetch/streams API, but I feel confident in finding solutions for situations that generally require client side streaming. https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web https://github.com/improbable-eng/grpc-web

brango 9y ago
I hadn't seen that. Thanks!
simonhorlick 9y ago
We've just gone live with a grpc-web based application. It's still early days and there are some rough edges, but it's an absolute joy to use and the amount of time we've saved is crazy.

cshenton 9y ago

There's also the fact that, for high level languages like python, the gRPC server has lower throughput than available python http servers. Even with the overhead of parsing http and whatever message format you're sending over it.

weberc2 9y ago
This is surprising given that there Python implementation is apparently C. Anyway I can't imagine this is the bottleneck in any nontrivial Python app.
- papercruncher 9y ago
  There's a known issue that's been open for a while, where a Python server could get stuck consuming 100% of a single CPU core, see https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/9688 https://github.com/grpc/grpc/issues/9688
  - weberc2 9y ago
    Granted, but this is clearly a bug in a pathological case; it's not consistent bad performance.

phamilton 9y ago

I'd say load balancing is still a big gRPC hurdle. See https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/load-balancing.md https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/master/doc/load-balancing.... for the current official stance on load balancing. It's pretty convoluted IMO.

brango 9y ago
IIRC on K8s there are some gRPC-aware load balancers, possibly Envoy, I forget.
YZF 9y ago
I agree. You kind of have to roll your own for every language you use which is odd. And retries. Hopefully some more standard way of handling this will emerge. EDIT: I enjoyed the GopherCon talk... I don't think the video is up yet but when it is I recommend watching...
leastangle 9y ago
I like the approach of custom name resolver though. Pretty straight forward to build one e.g. backed by Consul.

morecoffee 9y ago

Surprisingly, the reason why gRPC JS web support doesn't exist is because of Chrome. There is currently no way to access the HTTP trailers from Javascript. gRPC depends on trailers to tell when an RPC is complete when doing bidirectional streaming. Please tell browser devs to provide access to them! They have been part of the HTTP spec for years. Only recently have browsers entertained the idea: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339096 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1339096 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168232 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168232 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=691599 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=691599 https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/10939642/ https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platfor...