Binary and JSON serializer benchmarks updated

First of all I’d like to offer my sincere apologies to those who have asked me to update my benchmark numbers following the release of Json.NET 5.0.6, it took me a long time to clear some of my backlogs and only just got around to it, sorry for the waiting!

The good news is that, based on my tests against a simple POCO object (that’s representative of the payload that I work with often) Json.NET has delivered on its promised and offered big improvements on deserialization performance and is now neck-to-neck with ServiceStack.Text in terms of deserialization speed.

 

DISCLAIMER : as always, you should be benchmark against your payload and use case, the benchmark numbers I have produced here is unlikely to be representative of your use cases and neither is anybody else’s benchmark numbers.

You can use the simple test harness I created and see this example code for my JSON serializer tests to benchmark against your particular payload.

 

JSON

Here is the result against the latest versions of JSON serializers at the time of writing:

Versions of serializers tested:

• Json.Net v5.0.6
• ServiceStack.Text v3.9.59
• DataContractJsonSerializer
• JavaScriptSerializer
• SimpleJson
• fastJson v1.9.6
• JayRock v0.9.12915
• JsonFx v2.0.1209.2802
• MongoDB Driver v1.8.2

 

As mentioned previously, the latest version of Json.Net has made big improvements on its deserialization speed and is now on par with ServiceStack.Text.

 

Binary

Versions of serializers tested:

• BinaryFormatter
• protobuf-net v2.0.0.640
• MsgPack v0.1.4298.15470
• MessageShark
• FlourineFX v1.2.3
• Filbert v0.1.4617.2621

 

As you can see, there is little to choose between the usual suspects of protobuf-net, MessagePack and MessageShark, who are well clear of the rest of the pack. I have also included two additional binary serializers:

• FlourineFX, an open source library for working with Flash/Flex remoting, and comes with a serializer for AMF encoded data
• Filbert, a BERT (Binary ERlang Term) serializer and BERT-RPC client I wrote in F#. As you can see, purely from a performance point of view it needs much optimization on its deserialization speed (specifically it needs a buffer pool rather than allocating new array each time) which I have been hoping to find time to do for a while. In general, is interoperability with Erlang something .Net developers are interested in exploring? Would love to hear your thoughts on the matter, and if you know of alternative approaches (other than via something like BERT) you think worth investing.

 

Links

My Benchmarks

Simple Speed Tester

Code for the JSON benchmarks

Code for the binary benchmarks