Are channel/stubs in gRPC thread-safe

java thread-safety grpc
julius picture julius · Oct 18, 2015 · Viewed 8.5k times · Source

When using gRPC from Java, can I cache stubs (clients) and call them in a multi-threaded environment or are the channels thread-safe and can be safely cached?

If there is a network outage, should I recreate the channel or it is smart enough to reconnect? I couldn't find relevant info on http://www.grpc.io/docs/

Thanks

Answer

Eric Anderson picture Eric Anderson · Oct 19, 2015

Answer to first question:

Channels are thread safe; io.grpc.Channel is marked with @ThreadSafe annotation. Stubs are also thread-safe, which is why reconfiguration creates a new stub.

Answer to second question:

If there is a network outage, you don't need to recreate the channel. The channel will reconnect with exponential backoff, roughly as described by the connection backoff doc. Java does not 100% conform to that algorithm, because it doesn't increase connection timeouts in later retries. (Not to be confused with the exponential backoff, which is implemented.)

Related questions

Java synchronized method lock on object, or method?

If I have 2 synchronized methods in the same class, but each accessing different variables, can 2 threads access those 2 methods at the same time? Does the lock occur on the object, or does it get as specific as the variables inside …

Read More
How to stop a thread created by implementing runnable interface?

I have created class by implementing runnable interface and then created many threads(nearly 10) in some other class of my project.How to stop some of those threads?

Read More
Why is Java's SimpleDateFormat not thread-safe?

Please tell with a code example why is SimpleDateFormat not threadsafe. What is the problem in this class? Is The problem with format function of SimpleDateFormat? Please give a code which demonstrates this fault in class. FastDateFormat is threadsafe. Why? …

Read More