Message Serializers

This project was built to benchmark various serializers used in context of HTTP requests. We compare JSON vs. Protobufs vs. MessagePack running on a Flask service.

Getting Started

Requirements

• pip
• virtualenv & virtualenvwrapper
• python 2.7.10

Flask Service

1. Create virtual environment
   mkvirtualenv message_serializers

2. Activate virtualenv
   workon message_serializers

3. Install project requirements
   pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Run Flask server
   sh run_server.sh

Locust

1. Open a new terminal in the same project folder

2. Activate virtualenv
   workon message_serializers

3. Run Locust (use different configuration file depending on experiment)
   locust -f locust_config/<LOCUST CONFIG>.py --host=<FLASK SERVER> --web-host=0.0.0.0

4. Open Locust in browser
   0.0.0.0:8089

VM Instances

To run the experiments under a controlled environment, we launched 2 instances in Google Cloud - g1-small (1 vCPU, 1.7 GB memory) - one for the Flask server and another just for Locust.

Acknowledgments

A big thank you to @marcelolebre (my master Yoda) who introduced me to this technologies and pushed me to publish the blogpost.