Comment by kruador

I would add a further advantage of plain HTTP (REST) compared to gRPC. Splitting the response into blocks and having the client request the next block, as in the gRPC solution, causes round-trip delays. The server can't send the second block of data until the client requests it, so the server is essentially idle until the client has received all packets of the first block, parsed them and generated the next request.

In contrast, while HTTP/2 does impose framing of streams, that framing is done entirely server-side. If all one end has to send to the other is a single stream, it'll be DATA frame after DATA frame for the same stream. The client is not required to acknowledge anything. (At least, nothing above the TCP layer!)

It probably wasn't noticeable in this experiment as, if I'm reading it correctly, the server and client were on the same box, but if you were separated by any significant distance, plain HTTP should be noticeably faster.