Software Design

gRPC Unary Call Flow: Protobuf to Wire and Back

UML Sequence Diagrams · made in Skemio

Sequence diagram tracing a gRPC unary call through Client Stub, HTTP/2 Transport, and Server Stub with binary serialization steps.
Sequence diagram tracing a gRPC unary call through Client Stub, HTTP/2 Transport, and Server Stub with binary serialization steps.
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What it shows

  • Protobuf serializes objects into compact binary instead of text strings.
  • HTTP/2 multiplexes unary calls into binary frames with compressed headers.
  • Client and server stubs handle type-safe marshalling automatically.

The takeaway

Binary serialization plus HTTP/2 framing eliminates payload bloat and network parsing overhead.

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