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