Benchmarks of Go serialization methods

This is a test suite for benchmarking various Go serialization methods.

Tested serialization methods

• encoding/gob
• encoding/json
• github.com/alecthomas/binary
• github.com/davecgh/go-xdr/xdr
• github.com/Sereal/Sereal/Go/sereal
• github.com/ugorji/go/codec
• github.com/vmihailenco/msgpack
• github.com/youtube/vitess/go/bson (using the bsongen code generator)
• labix.org/v2/mgo/bson
• github.com/philhofer/msgp (code generator for msgpack)
• github.com/golang/protobuf (generated code)
• github.com/gogo/protobuf (generated code, optimized version of goprotobuf)
• github.com/DeDiS/protobuf (reflection based)

Running the benchmarks

go get -u -t
go test -bench='.*' ./

Shameless plug: I use pawk to format the table:

go test -bench='.*' ./ | pawk -F'\t' '"%-40s %10s %10s %s %s" % f'

Recommendation

If performance, correctness and interoperability are the most important factors, gogoprotobuf is currently the best choice. It does require a pre-processing step (eg. via Go 1.4's "go generate" command).

But as always, make your own choice based on your requirements.

Data

The data being serialized is the following structure with randomly generated values:

type A struct {
    Name     string
    BirthDay time.Time
    Phone    string
    Siblings int
    Spouse   bool
    Money    float64
}

Results

Results with Go 1.3 on an Intel i7-3930K:

benchmark                                  iter        time/iter   bytes alloc          allocs
---------                                  ----        ---------   -----------          ------
BenchmarkVmihailencoMsgpackMarshal      1000000    2005.00 ns/op      413 B/op     6 allocs/op
BenchmarkVmihailencoMsgpackUnmarshal    1000000    2543.00 ns/op      421 B/op    10 allocs/op
BenchmarkJsonMarshal                     500000    4374.00 ns/op      590 B/op     7 allocs/op
BenchmarkJsonUnmarshal                   500000    7055.00 ns/op      468 B/op     7 allocs/op
BenchmarkBsonMarshal                    1000000    2516.00 ns/op      489 B/op    13 allocs/op
BenchmarkBsonUnmarshal                  1000000    2784.00 ns/op      282 B/op    10 allocs/op
BenchmarkVitessBsonMarshal              1000000    1770.00 ns/op     1169 B/op     4 allocs/op
BenchmarkVitessBsonUnmarshal            2000000     930.00 ns/op      227 B/op     4 allocs/op
BenchmarkGobMarshal                      200000    8277.00 ns/op     1672 B/op    25 allocs/op
BenchmarkGobUnmarshal                     50000   59502.00 ns/op    19060 B/op   365 allocs/op
BenchmarkXdrMarshal                      500000    3296.00 ns/op      520 B/op    15 allocs/op
BenchmarkXdrUnmarshal                   1000000    2439.00 ns/op      274 B/op     9 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecMsgpackMarshal       500000    4321.00 ns/op     1527 B/op    23 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecMsgpackUnmarshal     500000    4037.00 ns/op     1159 B/op    23 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecBincMarshal          500000    4403.00 ns/op     1544 B/op    23 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecBincUnmarshal        500000    4257.00 ns/op     1303 B/op    25 allocs/op
BenchmarkSerealMarshal                   500000    5733.00 ns/op     1372 B/op    24 allocs/op
BenchmarkSerealUnmarshal                 500000    4970.00 ns/op      998 B/op    24 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinaryMarshal                  1000000    2384.00 ns/op      405 B/op    12 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinaryUnmarshal                1000000    2768.00 ns/op      433 B/op    17 allocs/op
BenchmarkMsgpMarshal                    5000000     466.00 ns/op      144 B/op     1 allocs/op
BenchmarkMsgpUnmarshal                  5000000     601.00 ns/op      113 B/op     3 allocs/op
BenchmarkGoprotobufMarshal              2000000     988.00 ns/op      314 B/op     3 allocs/op
BenchmarkGoprotobufUnmarshal            1000000    1376.00 ns/op      440 B/op     9 allocs/op
BenchmarkGogoprotobufMarshal           10000000     250.00 ns/op       64 B/op     1 allocs/op
BenchmarkGogoprotobufUnmarshal          5000000     349.00 ns/op      113 B/op     3 allocs/op
BenchmarkFlatbuffersMarshal             1000000       1383 ns/op      496 B/op    12 allocs/op
BenchmarkFlatBuffersUnmarshal           30000000      55.0 ns/op        0 B/op     0 allocs/op
BenchmarkProtobufMarshal                1000000    1399.00 ns/op      213 B/op     6 allocs/op
BenchmarkProtobufUnmarshal              1000000    1371.00 ns/op      193 B/op     7 allocs/op

Note: the gob results are not really representative of normal performance, as gob is designed for serializing streams or vectors of a single type, not individual values.

Issues

The benchmarks can also be run with validation enabled.

VALIDATE=1 go test -bench='.*' ./

Unfortunately, several of the serializers exhibit issues:

1. (minor) BSON drops sub-microsecond precision from time.Time.
2. (minor) Vitess BSON drops sub-microsecond precision from time.Time.
3. (minor) Ugorji Binc Codec drops the timezone name (eg. "EST" -> "-0500") from time.Time.

BenchmarkVmihailencoMsgpackMarshal   1000000          1770 ns/op         408 B/op          8 allocs/op
BenchmarkVmihailencoMsgpackUnmarshal      500000          3073 ns/op         512 B/op         15 allocs/op
BenchmarkJsonMarshal      500000          3292 ns/op         584 B/op          7 allocs/op
BenchmarkJsonUnmarshal    200000          6077 ns/op         543 B/op         10 allocs/op
BenchmarkBsonMarshal     1000000          2302 ns/op         504 B/op         19 allocs/op
BenchmarkBsonUnmarshal  --- FAIL: BenchmarkBsonUnmarshal
    serialization_benchmarks_test.go:299: unmarshaled object differed:
        &{36f9dfc8311e1efd 2014-12-20 08:28:56.697060419 +1100 AEDT bce6c01982 0 true 0.9078469433531421}
        &{36f9dfc8311e1efd 2014-12-20 08:28:56.697 +1100 AEDT bce6c01982 0 true 0.9078469433531421}
BenchmarkVitessBsonMarshal   1000000          1644 ns/op        1168 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkVitessBsonUnmarshal    --- FAIL: BenchmarkVitessBsonUnmarshal
    serialization_benchmarks_test.go:299: unmarshaled object differed:
        &{d22635208bfe823f 2014-12-20 08:28:58.370539555 +1100 AEDT 6c6e6d4ef8 2 true 0.2026063151373092}
        &{d22635208bfe823f 2014-12-19 21:28:58.37 +0000 UTC 6c6e6d4ef8 2 true 0.2026063151373092}
BenchmarkGobMarshal   200000          9770 ns/op        1688 B/op         35 allocs/op
BenchmarkGobUnmarshal      30000         47695 ns/op       17590 B/op        379 allocs/op
BenchmarkXdrMarshal   500000          2559 ns/op         519 B/op         24 allocs/op
BenchmarkXdrUnmarshal     500000          3016 ns/op         352 B/op         14 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecMsgpackMarshal    500000          3662 ns/op        1464 B/op         24 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecMsgpackUnmarshal      300000          4533 ns/op        1232 B/op         29 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecBincMarshal   500000          3745 ns/op        1480 B/op         24 allocs/op
BenchmarkUgorjiCodecBincUnmarshal   --- FAIL: BenchmarkUgorjiCodecBincUnmarshal
    serialization_benchmarks_test.go:299: unmarshaled object differed:
        &{94fd6da7835a0346 2014-12-20 08:29:10.50608751 +1100 AEDT 7749978493 0 true 0.09633537464986415}
        &{94fd6da7835a0346 2014-12-20 08:29:10.50608751 +1100 +1100 7749978493 0 true 0.09633537464986415}
BenchmarkSerealMarshal    300000          4572 ns/op        1360 B/op         26 allocs/op
BenchmarkSerealUnmarshal      300000          4950 ns/op        1068 B/op         39 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinaryMarshal   1000000          2168 ns/op         408 B/op         19 allocs/op
BenchmarkBinaryUnmarshal      500000          3249 ns/op         512 B/op         26 allocs/op
BenchmarkGoprotobufMarshal   2000000           928 ns/op         312 B/op          4 allocs/op
BenchmarkGoprotobufUnmarshal     1000000          1201 ns/op         432 B/op          9 allocs/op
BenchmarkProtobufMarshal     1000000          1342 ns/op         232 B/op          9 allocs/op
BenchmarkProtobufUnmarshal   1000000          2128 ns/op         288 B/op         12 allocs/op

All other fields are correct however.