Serializion Performance

Last week  I stuck my head out  in a meeting and declared that XML is verbose and slow to parse and that we should move to something like Google's protocols buffers,  or something readable such as json or YAML, which are  easier to parse etc etc etc! Well is this really true ? The statement seems logical considering how verbose XML can be. Still, after the meeting, some questions stayed in my mind. So I thought I would do some tests. I used  a FIX Globex (CME) swap trade confirmation message to test my theory.

		Size	from Python	to Python
json	cjson	2332	0.222238063812	0.0943419933319
pickle	cPickle	1778	0.233518123627	0.128826141357
XML	cElementTree	2083	0.407706975937	2.77832698822
json	simplejson	2332	3.37723612785	5.11316084862

So this simple test shows that using XML with cElementTree parser  is not so slow, cjson wins in speed and the conclusion must be: Your performance will ultimately depend on your data and the quality of the libraries you have available.

I'll try  to continue with these tests and maybe find  a better YAML library.