# Benchmarks

Comparing against other serialization solutions, running on Windows 7
64bit. We use the LITE runtime for Protocol Buffers (less code / lower
overhead), Rapid JSON (one of the fastest C++ JSON parsers around),
and pugixml, also one of the fastest XML parsers.

We compare against Flatbuffers with the binary wire format (as
intended), and also with JSON as the wire format with the optional JSON
parser (which, using a schema, parses JSON into a binary buffer that can
then be accessed as before).

The benchmark object is a set of about 10 objects containing an array, 4
strings, and a large variety of int/float scalar values of all sizes,
meant to be representative of game data, e.g. a scene format.

|                                                        | FlatBuffers (binary)  | Protocol Buffers LITE | Rapid JSON            | FlatBuffers (JSON)    | pugixml               |
|--------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------|-----------------------|-----------------------|-----------------------| ----------------------|
| Decode + Traverse + Dealloc (1 million times, seconds) | 0.08                  | 302                   | 583                   | 105                   | 196                   |
| Decode / Traverse / Dealloc (breakdown)                | 0 / 0.08 / 0          | 220 / 0.15 / 81       | 294 / 0.9 / 287       | 70 / 0.08 / 35        | 41 / 3.9 / 150        |
| Encode (1 million times, seconds)                      | 3.2                   | 185                   | 650                   | 169                   | 273                   |
| Wire format size (normal / zlib, bytes)                | 344 / 220             | 228 / 174             | 1475 / 322            | 1029 / 298            | 1137 / 341            |
| Memory needed to store decoded wire (bytes / blocks)   | 0 / 0                 | 760 / 20              | 65689 / 4             | 328 / 1               | 34194 / 3             |
| Transient memory allocated during decode (KB)          | 0                     | 1                     | 131                   | 4                     | 34                    |
| Generated source code size (KB)                        | 4                     | 61                    | 0                     | 4                     | 0                     |
| Field access in handwritten traversal code             | typed accessors       | typed accessors       | manual error checking | typed accessors       | manual error checking |
| Library source code (KB)                               | 15                    | some subset of 3800   | 87                    | 43                    | 327                   |

### Some other serialization systems we compared against but did not benchmark (yet), in rough order of applicability:

-   Cap'n'Proto promises to reduce Protocol Buffers much like FlatBuffers does,
    though with a more complicated binary encoding and less flexibility (no
    optional fields to allow deprecating fields or serializing with missing
    fields for which defaults exist).
    It currently also isn't fully cross-platform portable (lack of VS support).
-   msgpack: has very minimal forwards/backwards compatability support when used
    with the typed C++ interface. Also lacks VS2010 support.
-   Thrift: very similar to Protocol Buffers, but appears to be less efficient,
    and have more dependencies.
-   YAML: a superset of JSON and otherwise very similar. Used by e.g. Unity.
-   C# comes with built-in serialization functionality, as used by Unity also.
    Being tied to the language, and having no automatic versioning support
    limits its applicability.
-   Project Anarchy (the free mobile engine by Havok) comes with a serialization
    system, that however does no automatic versioning (have to code around new
    fields manually), is very much tied to the rest of the engine, and works
    without a schema to generate code (tied to your C++ class definition).