31–40 of 136 posts
From my perspective, I think the biggest issue with gRPC is it using HTTP/2. I understand that there’s a lot of reasons to say “No, HTTP/2 is far superior to HTTP/1.1.” However, in terms of proxying _outside Google_ HTTP/2 has lagged, and continues to lags at the L7 proxy layer. I recently performed a lot of high-throughput proxying comparing HAProxy, Traefik, and Envoy. HTTP/1.1 outperformed HTTP/2 (even H2C) by a p…
> However, Google is not one single company, but a collection of independent and distrusting companies.
This is an important thing to keep in mind when considering the behavior of any large company.
- sending down Server-Timing values for processing done after the headers are sent - updating the response status or redirecting after the headers are sent - deciding whether a response is cacheable after you've finished generating it
All of these except the first one obviously break assumptions about HTTP and I'm not surprised they're unsupported. Firefox [1] actually supports the first case. The rest have workarounds, you can do a meta-refresh or a JS redirect, and you could simply not stream cacheable pages (assuming they'd generally be served from cache anyway).
But it's still the case that frontend code generally likes to throw errors and trigger redirects in the course of rendering, rather than performing all that validation up front. That's sensible when you're rendering in a browser, but makes it hard to stream stuff with meaningful status codes.
> Why Do We Need Trailers At All? The author convinced they're needed. But I wonder if some sort of error signaling should have been baked into `Transfer-Encoding: chunked` instead. It wouldn't have made sense in HTTP/1.1 since you can just close the connection. But in later HTTP versions with pipelined requests, I can see the use for bailing on one request while keeping the rest alive.
> The author convinced they're needed. But I wonder if some sort of error signaling should have been baked into `Transfer-Encoding: chunked` instead. It wouldn't have made sense in HTTP/1.1 since you can just close the connection. But in later HTTP versions with pipelined requests, I can see the use for bailing on one request while keeping the rest alive. It did not to me. I would rephrase the argumentation as: - In…
How so? It is not solved on the network level (due to its use of TCP), but it is solved on application layer: slow response to one request is not blocking other requests.
> As an aside, HTTP/2 is technically superior to WebSockets. HTTP/2 keeps the semantics of the web, while WS does not. WTF is this? Those are different layer protocols. WebSocket can run on top of HTTP/2. It's like saying TLS is technically superior to TCP, or IP is superior to copper cables. Reference: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8441.html
Application layer encoding should not interfere in the protocol transport layer.
Author doesn't support the case for grpc being a "failure". I wonder by what measure. It's certainly pretty popular.
Being able to use gRPC in browsers was an explicit goal of the project, and that is impossible. gRPC-Web has to use a modified version of the protocol that has a limited feature set and performs worse for the reasons described in the article.
> As an aside, HTTP/2 is technically superior to WebSockets. HTTP/2 keeps the semantics of the web, while WS does not. WTF is this? Those are different layer protocols. WebSocket can run on top of HTTP/2. It's like saying TLS is technically superior to TCP, or IP is superior to copper cables. Reference: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8441.html
Websockets over http/2 are a new thing, and haven’t even been available at the time gRPC incepted.
> Why Do We Need Trailers At All? The author convinced they're needed. But I wonder if some sort of error signaling should have been baked into `Transfer-Encoding: chunked` instead. It wouldn't have made sense in HTTP/1.1 since you can just close the connection. But in later HTTP versions with pipelined requests, I can see the use for bailing on one request while keeping the rest alive.