upstream-grpc-go/Documentation/benchmark.md

Benchmark

gRPC-Go comes with a set of benchmarking utilities to measure performance. These utilities can be found in the benchmark directory within the project's root directory.

The main utility, aptly named benchmain, supports a host of configurable parameters to simulate various environments and workloads. For example, if your server's workload is primarily streaming RPCs with large messages with compression turned on, invoking benchmain in the following way may closely simulate your application:

$ go run google.golang.org/grpc/benchmark/benchmain/main.go \
    -workloads=streaming \
    -reqSizeBytes=1024 \
    -respSizeBytes=1024 \
    -compression=gzip

Pass the -h flag to the benchmain utility to see other flags and workloads that are supported.

Varying Payload Sizes (Weighted Random Distribution)

The benchmain utility supports two flags, -reqPayloadCurveFiles and -respPayloadCurveFiles, that can be used to specify histograms representing a weighted random distribution of request and response payload sizes, respectively. This is useful to simulate workloads with arbitrary payload sizes.

The options take a comma-separated list of file paths as value. Each file must be a valid CSV file with three columns in each row. Each row represents a range of payload sizes (first two columns) and the weight associated with that range (third column). For example, consider the below file:

1,32,12.5
128,256,12.5
1024,2048,25.0

Assume that benchmain is invoked like so:

$ go run google.golang.org/grpc/benchmark/benchmain/main.go \
    -workloads=unary \
    -reqPayloadCurveFiles=/path/to/csv \
    -respPayloadCurveFiles=/path/to/csv

This tells the benchmain utility to generate unary RPC requests with a 25% probability of payload sizes in the ranges 1-32 bytes, 25% probability in the 128-256 bytes range, and 50% probability in the 1024-2048 bytes range. RPC requests outside these ranges will not be generated.

You may specify multiple CSV files delimited by a comma. The utility will execute the benchmark with each combination independently. That is, the following command will execute four benchmarks:

$ go run google.golang.org/grpc/benchmark/benchmain/main.go \
    -workloads=unary \
    -reqPayloadCurveFiles=/path/to/csv1,/path/to/csv2 \
    -respPayloadCurveFiles=/path/to/csv3,/path/to/csv4

You may also combine PayloadCurveFiles with SizeBytes options. For example:

$ go run google.golang.org/grpc/benchmark/benchmain/main.go \
    -workloads=unary \
    -reqPayloadCurveFiles=/path/to/csv \
    -respSizeBytes=1