Comments on: Java serialization versus AMF/Hessian serialization

By: Ansury

Ansury — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 18:40:04 +0000

I think to avoid misunderstandings it should be noted that this is a less complete test than James Ward’s benchmarks. I’d be interested in seeing a more end-to-end comparison in which I would bet that AMF gains on Hessian (possibly quite a bit, but just a guess).

It does say “serialization” in the description but I can imagine some taking this as a more complete test than it is.

By: Heath Hunnicutt

Heath Hunnicutt — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:11:24 +0000

I wonder a reason AMF3 + deflate is inherently slow compared to Java serialization + deflate might be that the deflate algorithm has more “work” to do in attempting to deflate the already-lean AMF3. For example, deflate may create a large look-back dictionary, and also find it less useful, when processing the less-repetitive AMF3 format.

Which has an efficient representation for passing multiple objects of the same class and multiple instances of the same string object.

By: uwe schaefer

uwe schaefer — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:30:07 +0000

don´t know if earlier comments went through.

code is to be found on http://www.codesmell.org/blog/2009/08/faster-serialization/

By: cornel

cornel — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:40:34 +0000

Depends a lot on the input data. Take a look on Hessian specifications. Hessian/AMF are working very well when the object graph contains a lot of identical objects. For example imagine a list of Employees owning an object Town. Probably you will have 10 different Town objects at 1000 Employees. This case is very common for the UI’s – imagine that you have a grid when you want to display the Employees – you can have customer requests to display also the Town or another associated/composite objects.

Can you send me your input data (if it’s not confidential)? I can take a quick look.

By: uwe schaefer

uwe schaefer — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 09:33:27 +0000

weird. i see quite different numbers comparing hessian and java ser:

JBossSerializer: 1344ms (Size: 849289 bytes)
HessianSerializer: 1140ms (Size: 1239018 bytes)
PlainSerializer: 985ms (Size: 699312 bytes)
PlainGZipSerializer: 1328ms (Size: 306680 bytes)

not only plain is faster, but it also is significantly more compact.

By: uwe schaefer

uwe schaefer — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 07:29:32 +0000

looks like, i´d have to retest with hessian again. thanks for inspiration.

By: cornel

cornel — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:49:42 +0000

Java serialization+deflate is still not optimal especially when compared with hessian+deflate – I will add the results and source code this week.

By: bubak

bubak — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 20:36:12 +0000

Include XStream

By: evernat

evernat — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:27:30 +0000

Java Serialization has detection of duplicate and writing of references (named TC_REFERENCE in ObjectOutputStream) like AMF3 I suppose.

As all streams, java serialization can be compressed by encapsulating the stream with GZipOutputStream or DeflaterOutputStream : to be complete, it would be interesting to know how does AMF3+deflate or gzip compares to java serialization+deflat or gzip ?