GRPC Node + NextJs + Prisma + Envoy Proxy

Thanks for the post.

I used gRPC for a client-side application and ran into a few issues. It would be interesting to know if you have stumbled upon these as well and also how you resolve them.

1. gRPC-web only supports one-directional streams currently. Therefore, we had to design the protobuf services in a way that only considered one-directional streaming.
2. Many benefits of HTTP2 were not realised due to many browsers not yet supporting it properly. Therefore there was a connection limit and each browser had their own limit, I found 6 connections were a sweet spot. However, We still had to group all services into one protobuf file so only one connection was created. Bad architecture but those were the limitations. Envoy proxy only acts as an HTTP2 mediator so the connection in the browser is still HTTP1.x
3. gRPC-web has a memory leak issue for long running streams and we had to periodically kill and reopen the connection due to its dependency on XMLHTTPRequest. This wasnt very ideal but it somehow worked.
4. Debugging was also a pain. We had to create a custom logger as the browser extensions also opened connections which would sometimes go over the limit and freeze the browser

Ultimately my team ended up starting to put a websocket layer above grpc so the client didnt need to use it.

Let me know if you had these issues and how you solve them. would be interesting to see

Useful links:

• github.com/grpc/grpc-web/issues/1154

I also came across buf.build/blog/connect-a-better-grpc

It should be available now but never got a chance to use it