Flow Control

Overview

Flow control is a mechanism to ensure that a receiver of messages does not get overwhelmed by a fast sender. Flow control prevents data loss, improves performance and increases reliability. It applies to streaming RPCs and is not relevant for unary RPCs. By default, gRPC handles the interactions with flow control for you, though some languages allow you to take override the default behavior and take explicit control.

gRPC utilizes the underlying transport to detect when it is safe to send more data. As data is read on the receiving side, an acknowledgement is returned to the sender letting it know that the receiver has more capacity.

As needed, the gRPC framework will wait before returning from a write call. In gRPC, when a value is written to a stream, that does not mean that it has gone out over the network. Rather, that it has been passed to the framework which will now take care of the nitty gritty details of buffering it and sending it to the OS on its way over the network.

sequenceDiagram
    participant SA as Sender Application
    participant SG as Sender gRPC Framework
    participant RG as Receiver gRPC Framework
    participant RA as Receiver Application
  
  SA-)+SG: Stream Write
  alt sending too fast
    SG--)SG: Wait
  end
  alt allowed to send
    SG--)-SA: Write call returns
    SG->>RG:Send Msg
  end
  RA->>RG: Request message
  Note right of RA:  Request can be done either<br>after or before message arrives
  RG->>RA: Provide message
  RG->>SG: Send Ack w/ msg size
  opt waiting messages
    SG->>RG: Send Next Msg
  end

Language Support