What's the fastest Serialization mechanism for c#?

Question

This for small payloads.

I am looking to achieve 1,000,000,000 per 100ms.

The standard BinaryFormatter is very slow. The DataContractSerializer is slow than Bina

Answer 1

In my experience, Marc's Protocol Buffers implementation is very good. I haven't used Jon's. However, you should be trying to use techniques to minimise the data and not serialise the whole lot.

I would have a look at the following.

1. If the messages are small you should look at what entropy you have. You may have fields that can be partially or completely be de-duplicated. If the communication is between two parties only you may get benefits from building a dictionary both ends.

2. You are using TCP which has an overhead enough without a payload on top. You should minimise this by batching your messages in to larger bundles and/or look at UDP instead. Batching itself when combined with #1 may get you closer to your requirement when you average your total communication out.

3. Is the full data width of double required or is it for convenience? If the extra bits are not used this will be a chance for optimisation when converting to a binary stream.

Generally generic serialisation is great when you have multiple messages you have to handle over a single interface or you don't know the full implementation details. In this case it would probably be better to build your own serialisation methods to convert a single message structure directly to byte arrays. Since you know the full implementation both sides direct conversion won't be a problem. It would also ensure that you can inline the code and prevent box/unboxing as much as possible.