When building high-performance microservices in Go, one question inevitably comes up: Should you use REST or gRPC? This isn’t just an architectural debate it directly impacts latency, throughput, infrastructure cost, and scalability . In this post, we’ll break down REST vs gRPC performance using real benchmarks, practical Go examples, and production insights. 🧠 Understanding the Core Difference Before diving into benchmarks, it’s important to understand why performance differs. REST Uses HTTP/1.1 (typically) Data format: JSON (text-based) Stateless, resource-oriented gRPC Uses HTTP/2 Data format: Protocol Buffers (binary) Supports streaming (bi-directional) Why This Matters Binary serialization is more compact and faster to parse HTTP/2 enables multiplexing multiple requests over a single connection Reduced payload size = faster network transfer ⚙️ Benchmark Setup (Go) Reference repository: 👉 https://github.com/chimanjain/go-rest-grpc-bencmark This project benchmarks: REST API (JSON over HTTP) gRPC API…