Comment by TheGuyWhoCodes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheGuyWhoCodes | Hacker News Reader

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You didn't define small or medium size and number of messages. From my experience server stream while great for memory and giving the client time to process messages as they come can be slower than unary. One way to solve that is to have a batched message with a repeated field of the underline message you want to send, it's an order faster.

I read sometime ago about about server pushback, maybe you need to override/implement your own StreamObserver to notify the client to slow down as the server isn't ready yet or configure the amount of data the gRPC server can queue there are quite a few configurations (a lot of them obscured) you can make to the server/grpc service.

Seems so much work for something already implemented with messaging brokers, though.

In my opinion, clients themselves shouldn't worry about if the server is ready or not, only handle if the server does not respond in x seconds and then simply crash or error out. It is the same you would to with any other external service call.

I think the biggest change to gRPC is to the way I thought. Dumb clients was always something that I chose because it was an order of magnitude simpler to reason about. gRPC comes in and changes this by making the clients smart and the servers smarter, which brings allot of complexity to the table.

Also, indeed the configurations are so obscure.

It's just a different framework for a different use case. The fact that it's http 2 and support bi-directional streams is nice for low latency applications.

I doesn't make RPC over message brokers deprecated and if that works for you under you conditions that's great.

You can say the same about message brokers. Is it LIFO, FIFO or something random? what about acknowledge, is it late or not? Can the queue hold responses (Rabbit advices against using it as a result store)?

In that regard message brokers are complicated, lets just do http calls and let the load balancer take care of routing, it's much simpler and the client is very dumb.

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