grpc: pip grpcio install is (still) very slow

Please upgrade pip. We upgrade our binary wheel to manylinux2010 which requires pip > 19.0.0.

pip install --upgrade pip

To elaborate on that, for @rtshadow: the manylinux2010 standard for wheels (PEP-571) assumes the presence of basic but specific runtime libraries. The most essential, glibc, is not present in the minimal Alpine image of Python. Instead, they use musl as the alternative c library to cut down image size even further. This is explained on the Docker Hub Python image description (see excerpt below), but I think those lines could be improved to include what this means with respect to compatibility of wheels.

None of this is specific to gRPC, by the way.

Also, if you want to be sure you want to use wheels only and let pip fail on that, there’s an option for that. pip install --only-binary ":all:" grpcio and it should hard-fail if your platform is incompatible. I haven’t found a simple way to let pip print its compatible platform tags.

I’m still experiencing the same issue. Here’s how to reproduce:

docker run -it --rm --entrypoint /bin/sh python:3.7-alpine
apk update && apk upgrade && apk add build-base # without this grpcio install will fail with "No such file or directory: 'cc': 'cc'"
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install grpcio==1.30.0

I just tried to install in my machine with python 3.10 and the build took 35 mins… (mac M1, 16G RAM)

@rtshadow PyPI only support source wheels or binary wheels that comply with manylinux standard. But alpine is not included by manylinux. So, for Python packages with C extension (like gRPC, numpy), pip cannot download pre-compiled wheel but compile from scratch.

@TalhaNaeem1 Please scroll up to read my earlier comment; you’re using an alternative Python-Docker distribution (Alpine) for which no grpcio wheels are published. (But even if there were, your version is pinned to a version predating the standard described below.)

You can see it here on PyPI; cp3X with manylinux tags are the wheels for glibc with CPython. Wheels for Alpine that ships with musl instead of glibc were standardized just months ago in PEP-565. If you really really really want Alpine, consider filing a feature request for gprc to build wheels targeting the numerous musllinux platform tags. In the meantime, use regular glibc Python images.

Also, consider upgrading to a stable release of grpcio, your version is nearly 2 years old. Similar for the Python 3.7, but okay.

I.e. change your steps to:

docker run -it --rm --entrypoint /bin/sh python:3.10
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install grpcio==1.44.0

HTH

I also noticed this a while ago when testing grpcio 1.27 releases and learned it the hard way. Wanted to leave some archeology trails here for whoever is interested. 😃

• This was changed intentionally via #20282 initially (surfaced in 1.27.0)
• Then reverted for 1.27.1 in #21924
• Re-enabled via #21780 (surfaced in 1.28.0).