In addition to one or more RPC stubs, every RPC server and RPC client is linked with a copy of the RPC runtime. Runtime operations perform tasks such as controlling communications between clients and servers and finding servers for clients on request. An interface's client and server stubs exchange arguments through their local RPC runtimes. The client runtime transmits remote procedure calls to the server. The server runtime receives the calls and dispatches each call to the appropriate server stub. The server runtime sends the call results to the client runtime. The DCE RPC runtime supports the RPC API used by RPC application code to call runtime routines.
Server application code must also contain server initialization code that calls RPC runtime routines when the server is starting up and shutting down. Client application code can also call RPC runtime routines. Server and client application code can also contain calls to RPC stub-support routines. Stub-support routines allow applications to manage programming tasks such as allocating and freeing memory.