A sender makes a request via a function, method, or procedure call. RPC then translates these into requests transmitted over the network to the intended destination. A relatively common programming technique available in UNIX since the 1990s and introduced into the Windows family with Windows NT more recently, the RPC receiver processes the request on the basis of a procedure’s name and list of arguments and then sends a response to the sender when this step is completed. RPC applications implement software modules called “proxies” and “stubs” to broker the remote calls and cause them to appear to the programmer to be identical to local procedure calls. Applications making use of RPC programming operate synchronously, meaning that they wait until the remote procedure returns a result. RPC incorporates a “time-out” logic to deal with network failures or scenarios in which RPCs do not return.

See Also: Network; UNIX.