What's up with the benchmarks? :(

[ghost]

Here is code:

var avro = require('avsc');





var os = require('os');

console.log(" OS: " + os.type() + " " + os.release() + " (" + os.arch() + ")");
console.log("RAM: " + os.totalmem()/1048576 + " MB (total), " + os.freemem()/1048576 + " MB (free)");
console.log("CPU: " + os.cpus()[0].speed + " MHz " + os.cpus()[0].model);

for(var r = 1; r < 2; r++) {
  console.log("\nRun #" + r + ":");
  // var obj = {'abcdef' : 1, 'qqq' : 13, '19' : [1, 2, 3, 4]};

  var obj = {
  name: 'Pet',
  type: 'record',
  fields: [
    {name: 'kind', type: {name: 'Kind', type: 'enum', symbols: ['CAT', 'DOG']}},
    {name: 'name', type: 'string'}
  ]
};



  var start = Date.now();
  for(var i = 0; i < 500000; i++) {
    (JSON.stringify(obj));
  }
  var stop = Date.now();
  console.log("\t      JSON: " + (stop - start) + "ms");

  start = Date.now();
  for(var i = 0; i < 500000; i++) {
     avro.parse(obj);


  }
  stop = Date.now();
  console.log("\t      Avro: " + (stop - start) + "ms");
}

Results:

Run #1:
JSON: 1216ms
Avro: 30162ms

I thought Avro was going to perform faster than JSON?

[mtth]

There are several things wrong with your benchmark.

The first and most important is that you're not comparing equivalent operations: you should be comparing JSON.parse with type.toBuffer or type.encode. avro.parse generates a type from a schema, it's a pre-processing step which should only be done once per schema.

The other major problem is that micro-benchmarks are tricky to get right. v8 has many optimizations which can render your benchmark meaningless. If we tweak your code to remove any obvious pitfalls (see below), we get:

JSON: 2239ms
Avro: 2200ms

var avro = require('avsc');

var schema = {
  name: 'Pet',
  type: 'record',
  fields: [
    {name: 'kind', type: {name: 'Kind', type: 'enum', symbols: ['CAT', 'DOG']}},
    {name: 'age', type: 'int'} // To simplify preventing getting hoisted out of the loop.
  ]
};

var type = avro.parse(schema); // Done once upfront.

var start = Date.now();
for (var i = 0; i < 5000000; i++) {
  if (JSON.stringify({age: i, kind: 'CAT'}).length < 2) {
    throw new Error();
  }
}
var stop = Date.now();
console.log("\t      JSON: " + (stop - start) + "ms");

start = Date.now();
for (var i = 0; i < 5000000; i++) {
  if (type.toBuffer({age: i, kind: 'CAT'}).length < 2) {
    throw new Error();
  }
}
stop = Date.now();
console.log("\t      Avro: " + (stop - start) + "ms");

[ghost]

Awww. I'm an idiot. Well, I'll be using Avro from now on then :) Thanks for the explanation haha.

Cannot wait to get this puppy across our binary websockets, she will fly.