While reading Comparing the Java Serialization Options I ran across the a cool google code project which has done an excellent job benchmarking a wide variety of serialization options for java.

I’ve had been researching the protobuf encoding format for a while and really liked it. But I did not really like the Java implementation that Google had published. It was kinda clunky to use and I saw several optimizations that could be used that were missing. Optimizations that could create huge performance wins when applied to the usage patterns of an enterprise messaging system like Apache ActiveMQ. So I created a new protobuf implementation in the ActiveMQ project.

Naturally, I was curious to see how the activemq protobuf implementation stacked up against similar technologies. So I grabbed the V1 benchmark source code and added our implementation to it. If you want to do the same, apply this patch.

Once I ran the benchmark and I was very pleased with the results. I’m including the performance graphs of our impl and standard protobuf and thrift for comparison.

As it turns out, our implementation looks awesome in the benchmark! How about that decoding speed!

It’s getting late here.. so I’ll have do a follow up post explaining how come we did so much better.