After reading the blog post from James Newton-King on serialization speed of the the new release of Jason.Net, I decided to benchmark the different serializers I have in my Disk Bases Data Structures project. The serialization is done to a byte array. (The project contains a factory class which benchmarks your data type and returns the fastest one)
AltSerialize can be found at codeproject, and the .Net implementations of Google Protocol Buffers at Google Code.
For the first test I used the same class hierarchy as Jason.Net.
The serialization sizes were as follow:
| BinaryFormatter | 2937 bytes |
| AltSerialize | 610 bytes |
| DataContractSerializer | 1237 bytes |
| protobuf-net | 245 |
The second test is done on a well defined struct located at the bottom of this posting.
The serialization sizes were as follow:
| BinaryFormatter | 303 bytes |
| DataContractSerializer | 272 bytes |
| AltSerialize | 150 bytes |
| Marshal.Copy | 144 |
| Unsafe pointers | 144 |
As you can see the memory copying variants are a lot faster than the other serializers when it comes to structs laid out sequential in memory. AltSerialize is also fairly quick, as it uses Marshal.Copy as well. The big winner is the version using pointers to copy the data. It’s 10x to Marshal.Copy on serialization and 17x on deserialization. Compared to the DataContractSerializer we’re talking almost 100x on serializing and over 250x on deserializing.
But remember that these tests were done on 100,000 iterations. For all normal purposes they would all work just fine.
If speed is of importance to you combined with a lot of serializing happening, then you can gain speed by choosing the right serializer.
[DataContract]
[Serializable]
[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)]
public struct Coordinate
{
[DataMember(Order = 1)]
public float X;
[DataMember(Order = 2)]
public float Y;
[DataMember(Order = 3)]
public float Z;
[DataMember(Order = 4)]
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Currency)]
public decimal Focus;
[DataMember(Order = 5)]
[MarshalAs(UnmanagedType.Struct)]
public Payload Payload;
}
[DataContract]
[Serializable]
[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential,Size = 113)]
public struct Payload
{
[DataMember(Order = 1)]
public byte Version;
[DataMember(Order = 2)]
public byte Data;
}
