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

The only reason to serialize objects is to make them compatible with a generic transport medium. Network, disk, etc. The perf of the serializer never matters because the transport medium is always so much slower than the raw perf of a CPU core. Easily by two orders of magnitude or more.

Which is also the reason that attributes are an acceptable trade-off. They are also I/O bound, their initialization data has to be read from the assembly metadata. Which requires a disk read for the first time.

So, if you are setting perf requirements, you need to focus 99% on the capability of the transport medium. A billion 'payloads' in 100 milliseconds requires very beefy hardware. Assume a payload is 16 bytes, you'll need to move 160 gigabytes in a second. This is quite beyond even the memory bus bandwidth inside the machine. DDR RAM moves at about 5 gigabytes per second. A one gigabit Ethernet NIC moves at 125 megabytes per second, burst. A commodity hard drive moves at 65 megabytes per second, assuming no seeking.

Your goal is not realistic with current hardware capabilities.

Answer 2

You could write a custom serialization by implement ISerailizable on your data structures. Anyway you will probably face some "impedence" from the hardware itself to serialize with these requirements.

Answer 3

Your performance requirement restricts the available serializers to 0. A custom BinaryWriter and BinaryReader would be the fastest you could get.