RPC Protocol Triple&Dubbo Benchmark Testing

The implementation of the Dubbo protocol in Dubbo3 is basically on par with the Dubbo2 version in terms of performance.
Since the Triple protocol is built on HTTP/2, RPC calls over a single link do not show an improvement compared to Dubbo2 based on TCP, and there is actually a certain decrease in some calling scenarios. However, the Triple protocol has greater advantages in gateway penetration, universality, and overall throughput improvement brought by the Stream communication model.
Triple is expected to perform better under gateway proxy scenarios, and benchmarks were not provided in the current stress test environment.

1.1 Environment

	Description
Machine	4C8G Linux JDK 1.8 (Provider) 4C8G Linux JDK 1.8 (Consumer)
Stress Test Cases	RPC method types include: no-parameter no return value, ordinary pojo return value, pojo list return value Version 2.7 Dubbo protocol (Hessian2 serialization) Version 3.0 Dubbo protocol (Hessian2 serialization) Version 3.0 Dubbo protocol (Protobuf serialization) Version 3.0 Triple protocol (Protobuf serialization) Version 3.0 Triple protocol (Protobuf plus Hessian2 serialization)
Stress Testing Method	In a single link scenario, the consumer starts 32 concurrent threads (the current machine configuration has a balanced qps rt concurrency), continuously collecting test data Test data is obtained from https://github.com/apache/dubbo-benchmark

	Dubbo + Hessian2 2.7	Dubbo + Hessian2 3.0	Dubbo + Protobuf 3.0	Triple + Protobuf 3.0	Triple + Protobuf(Hessian) 3.0
No-parameter Method	30333 ops/s 2.5ms P99	30414 ops/s 2.4ms P99	24123 ops/s 3.2ms P99	7016 ops/s 8.7ms P99	6635 ops/s 9.1ms P99
Pojo Return Value	8984 ops/s 6.1 ms P99	12279 ops/s 5.7 ms P99	21479 ops/s 3.0 ms P99	6255 ops/s 8.9 ms P99	6491 ops/s 10 ms P99
Pojo List Return Value	1916 ops/s 34 ms P99	2037 ops/s 34 ms P99	12722 ops/s 7.7 ms P99	6920 ops/s 9.6 ms P99	2833 ops/s 27 ms P99

Figure 3 Comparison of Dubbo protocol implementations across different versions

In terms of the default combination of Dubbo RPC + Hessian, Dubbo3 and Dubbo2 are basically on par in performance across different calling scenarios.

Figure 4 Triple vs Dubbo

Looking solely at point-to-point calls between Consumer and Provider, it can be seen that the Triple protocol does not have an advantage; similarly using Protobuf serialization, Dubbo RPC protocol overall performance still outperforms Triple.
The implementation of Triple in version 3.0 will continue to be optimized, but it cannot completely change the disadvantage of “HTTP/2-based RPC protocol” compared to “TCP-based RPC protocol” in certain scenarios.