Compression with gRPC Python

gRPC offers lossless compression options in order to decrease the number of bits transferred over the wire. Three levels of compression are available:

• grpc.Compression.NoCompression - No compression is applied to the payload. (default)
• grpc.Compression.Deflate - The “Deflate” algorithm is applied to the payload.
• grpc.Compression.Gzip - The Gzip algorithm is applied to the payload.

The default option on both clients and servers is grpc.Compression.NoCompression.

See the gRPC Compression Spec for more information.

Client Side Compression

Compression may be set at two levels on the client side.

At the channel level

with grpc.insecure_channel('foo.bar:1234', compression=grpc.Compression.Gzip) as channel:
    use_channel(channel)

At the call level

Setting the compression method at the call level will override any settings on the channel level.

stub = helloworld_pb2_grpc.GreeterStub(channel)
response = stub.SayHello(helloworld_pb2.HelloRequest(name='you'),
                         compression=grpc.Compression.Deflate)

Server Side Compression

Additionally, compression may be set at two levels on the server side.

On the entire server

server = grpc.server(futures.ThreadPoolExecutor(),
                     compression=grpc.Compression.Gzip)

For an individual RPC

def SayHello(self, request, context):
    context.set_response_compression(grpc.Compression.NoCompression)
    return helloworld_pb2.HelloReply(message='Hello, %s!' % request.name)

Setting the compression method for an individual RPC will override any setting supplied at server creation time.