Skip to content

Real-time & RPC

The synchronous-but-streaming side of the wire. SignalR for web real-time, gRPC (basic and advanced), raw WebSockets/SSE for cases where SignalR is too heavy, and binary serialization choices.

Topics (canonical order)

  •   SignalR

    Hubs, transports, auto-negotiation, scaling with Redis backplane, Azure SignalR Service

  •   gRPC

    Protobuf, four call types (unary/server-stream/client-stream/bidi), gRPC-Web, JSON transcoding

  •   gRPC Advanced

    Interceptors, deadlines, retries, gRPC-Web vs Connect, perf vs REST

  •   WebSockets & SSE

    Raw WebSocket API, server-sent events, when SignalR is overkill

  •   Binary Serialization

    MessagePack, Protobuf-net, choosing wire formats, perf vs compatibility trade-offs

  •   GraphQL with HotChocolate

    Code-first vs schema-first, resolvers, DataLoader, subscriptions, Fusion (federation), persisted queries, when GraphQL beats REST

Why this order (and why this section follows distributed systems)

Real-time and RPC are usually consumed AFTER you've internalized messaging fundamentals (Distributed Systems). SignalR is the most common entry point for web apps; gRPC follows because it's the dominant intra-service RPC. Raw WebSockets/SSE come third for the cases where SignalR's overhead isn't worth it. Binary serialization closes the section because the wire format choice often dominates the perf conversation.

Cross-references