Recently I’ve been working on some extensions to ASEXOR, adding there direct support for messaging via WebSocket and I use JSON for small messages that travels between client (browser or standalone)  and backend.  Messages looks like these:

messages = [
    {'call_id': 1, 'kwargs': {}, 'args': ['sleep', 0.1]},
    {'call_id': 1, 't': 'r', 'returned': 'd53b2823d35b471282ab5c8b6c2e4685'},
    {'call_id': 2, 'kwargs': {'utc': True}, 'args': ['date', '%d-%m-%Y %H:%M %Z']},
    {'call_id': 2, 't': 'r', 'returned': '77da239342e240a0a3078d50019a20a0'},
    {'call_id': 1, 'data': {'status': 'started', 'task_id': 'd53b2823d35b471282ab5c8b6c2e4685'}, 't': 'm'},
    {'call_id': 2, 'data': {'status': 'started', 'task_id': '77da239342e240a0a3078d50019a20a0'}, 't': 'm'},
    {'call_id': 1, 'data': {'status': 'success', 'task_id': 'd53b2823d35b471282ab5c8b6c2e4685', 'result': None, 'duration': 0.12562298774719238}, 't': 'm'},
    {'call_id': 2, 'data': {'status': 'success', 'task_id': '77da239342e240a0a3078d50019a20a0', 'result': '27-02-2017 11:46 UTC', 'duration': 0.04673957824707031}, 't': 'm'}
    
]

I wondered, if choosing different serialization format(s) (similar to JSON, but binary) could bring more efficiency into the application –  considering  both message size and encoding/decoding processing time.  I run small tests  in python 3.5 (CPython and PyPy)  (see tests here on gist) with few established serializers, which can be used as quick replacement for JSON and below are results (updated Dec 2nd 2017 thanks to comment below, as situation changed a bit with new libraries versions): Continue reading Comparison of JSON Like Serializations – JSON vs UBJSON vs MessagePack vs CBOR →