Benchmarking gRPC in Rust & Go

4 min readJul 16, 2020

Some background

If you’re a developer looking to build a reliable, memory safe, high performance application today, Rust & Go are surely your options.

If you’re looking to get even more performance out of your internal applications, you might also want to look at using gRPC instead of a normal REST api. All these are solutions to reducing your computational overhead.

I try to compare various libraries to understand their performance and hope you find it helpful.

Libraries looked at

tower-grpc (Rust)
A performant rust library, though it is replaced with tonic
grpc-go (Golang)
The official go module for grpc.
grpc-rust (Rust)
Still in development, another grpc in rust. Looked promising.
tonic (Rust)
An improved update from tower-grpc supporting the new await syntax
grpc-node (NodeJs)
Included for a benchmarking reference point.
grpc-rs (Rust — C bindings)
A rust library that uses grpc

Benchmark Tool

For the benchmark I’ll use the equivalent of Hey for gRPC, ghz.

The test will focus on how much overhead there is if the same load of 10,000 concurrent requests is sent to servers using each of the libraries above. I will use the same helloworld greeter for each. TLS will not be enabled for any of the tests so we can get an idea of the raw performance with each.

grpc-go

Summary:
  Count: 10000
  Total: 229.40 ms
  Slowest: 6.26 ms
  Fastest: 0.11 ms
  Average: 1.04 ms
  Requests/sec: 43591.54Response time histogram:
  0.114 [1]    |
  0.728 [3355] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  1.343 [4580] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  1.957 [1519] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  2.572 [294]  |∎∎∎
  3.187 [36]   |
  3.801 [11]   |
  4.416 [74]   |∎
  5.030 [52]   |
  5.645 [45]   |
  6.259 [33]   |Latency distribution:
  10 % in 0.46 ms
  25 % in 0.64 ms
  50 % in 0.88 ms
  75 % in 1.24 ms
  90 % in 1.68 ms
  95 % in 2.00 ms
  99 % in 4.77 msStatus code distribution:
  [OK]   10000 responses

tonic

Summary:
  Count: 10000
  Total: 581.81 ms
  Slowest: 6.39 ms
  Fastest: 0.17 ms
  Average: 2.84 ms
  Requests/sec: 17187.66Response time histogram:
  0.174 [1]    |
  0.796 [5]    |
  1.418 [6]    |
  2.040 [167]  |∎
  2.662 [3427] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  3.284 [5074] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  3.906 [1048] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  4.528 [217]  |∎∎
  5.150 [29]   |
  5.773 [21]   |
  6.395 [5]    |Latency distribution:
  10 % in 2.35 ms
  25 % in 2.55 ms
  50 % in 2.79 ms
  75 % in 3.07 ms
  90 % in 3.39 ms
  95 % in 3.66 ms
  99 % in 4.22 msStatus code distribution:
  [OK]   10000 responses

grpc-node

Summary:
  Count: 10000
  Total: 589.25 ms
  Slowest: 12.56 ms
  Fastest: 1.21 ms
  Average: 2.88 ms
  Requests/sec: 16970.81Response time histogram:
  1.206 [1]    |
  2.341 [2592] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  3.476 [5516] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  4.612 [1588] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  5.747 [180]  |∎
  6.882 [42]   |
  8.017 [32]   |
  9.152 [5]    |
  10.288 [20]  |
  11.423 [6]   |
  12.558 [18]  |Latency distribution:
  10 % in 2.14 ms
  25 % in 2.33 ms
  50 % in 2.62 ms
  75 % in 3.24 ms
  90 % in 3.85 ms
  95 % in 4.26 ms
  99 % in 6.41 msStatus code distribution:
  [OK]   10000 responses

tower-grpc

Summary:
  Count: 10000
  Total: 571.88 ms
  Slowest: 10.59 ms
  Fastest: 0.25 ms
  Average: 2.76 ms
  Requests/sec: 17486.12Response time histogram:
  0.246 [1]    |
  1.280 [139]  |∎
  2.314 [2927] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  3.348 [5198] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  4.382 [1390] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  5.416 [114]  |∎
  6.450 [61]   |
  7.484 [80]   |∎
  8.518 [47]   |
  9.552 [31]   |
  10.586 [12]  |Latency distribution:
  10 % in 1.80 ms
  25 % in 2.20 ms
  50 % in 2.65 ms
  75 % in 3.13 ms
  90 % in 3.64 ms
  95 % in 4.05 ms
  99 % in 7.18 msStatus code distribution:
  [OK]   10000 responses

grpc-rust

Summary:
  Count: 10000
  Total: 479.30 ms
  Slowest: 8.15 ms
  Fastest: 0.90 ms
  Average: 2.34 ms
  Requests/sec: 20863.64Response time histogram:
  0.901 [1]    |
  1.626 [193]  |∎
  2.351 [5587] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  3.076 [3562] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  3.801 [506]  |∎∎∎∎
  4.526 [119]  |∎
  5.251 [16]   |
  5.976 [5]    |
  6.701 [2]    |
  7.426 [2]    |
  8.151 [7]    |Latency distribution:
  10 % in 1.87 ms
  25 % in 2.03 ms
  50 % in 2.25 ms
  75 % in 2.57 ms
  90 % in 2.90 ms
  95 % in 3.23 ms
  99 % in 4.11 msStatus code distribution:
  [OK]   10000 responses

Grpc-rs

Summary:
  Count: 10000
  Total: 289.82 ms
  Slowest: 4.22 ms
  Fastest: 0.22 ms
  Average: 1.36 ms
  Requests/sec: 34504.74Response time histogram:
  0.222 [1]    |
  0.621 [195]  |∎∎
  1.021 [1829] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  1.420 [4059] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  1.820 [2625] |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  2.219 [972]  |∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎∎
  2.618 [239]  |∎∎
  3.018 [45]   |
  3.417 [18]   |
  3.817 [6]    |
  4.216 [11]   |Latency distribution:
  10 % in 0.87 ms
  25 % in 1.07 ms
  50 % in 1.30 ms
  75 % in 1.62 ms
  90 % in 1.90 ms
  95 % in 2.07 ms
  99 % in 2.56 msStatus code distribution:
  [OK]   10000 responses