Problems and abuse of protocol buffers

At present, the company has widely used Protocol buffers.

I found a lot in the process of using Protocol buffers The use and abuse of , It's also frustrating to use a good tool like this .

 

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The following is a brief summary of the problems in use .

Protocol buffers Intention

Protocol buffers To speed up the network data transmission , Compress the transmitted data , By exposing interfaces, programs can communicate faster .

Take a chestnut , Service or program A Need to get user information , But the way to get user information is already in the service or program B It defines .

There are several solutions .

1. A Rewrite again B Methods already defined in , This is obviously the most uneconomical , Why rewrite , And it also causes redundancy , Not easy to maintain .
2. B Program provides interface , And then we passed HTTP Mode of access , Get the returned data and then serialize and deserialize .
3. Use Protocol buffers,B The program is defined proto The way the file will be B The method in is exposed ,A The program can use this method directly in the program , If B The method of the program has changed or upgraded ,A The program doesn't need to be modified too much , Because in A This method is directly used in the program .

Let's focus on usage scenarios 3. In this usage scenario , Data exchange is still used HTTP, The defined data transmission format is in proto Defined in the file .

If B The method in the program has changed , But the transmission format has not changed , This will not affect the program A Method of .

adopt HTTP The data transmission is compressed , It is more efficient than ordinary uncompressed JSON Smaller data . For the network, smaller data means greater efficiency .

The simple explanation is to use Protocol buffers It is equal to in the scene 2 It gives you a new layer of encapsulation .

Protocol buffers Amount of data transmitted

Protobuf The maximum data transmission limit is 2GB.

By default it is 64MB.

Don't think it's used Protocol buffers You can transmit data of any size without restraint , It's not like that , If the amount of data returned by the method in the program is too large , Or object List Too complicated .

You will naturally encounter more than Protocol buffers The size of the transmission limit , Then throw an exception .

This also has a lot to do with program design , Our current system can't wait to transmit the whole table , I don't know how to say .

Protocol buffers Indiscriminate call

No one really cares about maintenance proto file , How do you want to use it .

The problem with the result is ： A service needs to run , Need to start other 5 Services can be debugged locally .

And because the start of each service occupies ports , Therefore, it will lead to cross calls of various methods , Make the written program very difficult to debug locally .

The solution is to define the function of each service , Don't abuse too much Protocol buffers To call .

In fact, the above problems are man-made , Once the best thing is abused , It's all kinds of wonderful flowers .

​ ​https://www.ossez.com/t/protocol-buffers/14042​​