On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:25 AM, Feng Xiao <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 12:11 AM, Michael Grove <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> I am using protobuf for the wire format of a protocol I'm working on as a
>> replacement to JSON.  The original protobuf messages were not much more
>> than JSON as protobuf; my protobuf message just contained the same fields
>> w/ the same format as the JSON structure.  This worked fine, but the
>> payloads tended to be the same or larger than their JSON equivalent.  I
>> tried using the union types technique, specifically with extensions as
>> outlined in the docs [1], and this worked very well wrt to compression, the
>> resulting messages were much smaller than the previous approach.
>>
>> However, the parsing of the smaller messages far outweighs the advantage
>> of less IO.
>>
>

> You mean parsing protobufs performs worse than parsing JSON?
>

For the nest structured based on extensions as described in the techniques
sections of the protobuf docs, throughput it about the same.  I assume that
means parsing is slower because I'm sending fewer bytes over the wire.  My
original attempt at a protobuf based format was the fastest option, but it
tended to be the most bytes sent over the wire, often more than the raw
data I was sending.


>
>
>> When I run a simple profiling example, the top 10-15 hot spots are all
>> parsing of the messages.  The top ten most expensive methods are as follows:
>>
>> MessageType1$Builder.mergeFrom
>> MessageType2$Builder.mergeFrom
>> MessageType1.getDescriptor()
>> MessageType1$Builder.getDescriptorForType
>> MessageType3$Builder.mergeFrom
>> MessageType2.getDescriptor
>> MessageType2$Builder.getDescriptorForType
>> MessageType1$Builder.create
>> MessageType1$Builder.buildPartial
>> MessageType3.isInitialized
>>
>> The organization is pretty straightforward, MessageType3 contains a
>> repeated list of MessageType2.  MessageType2 has three required fields of
>> type MessageType1.  MessageType1 has a single required value, which is an
>> enum.  The value of the enum defines which of the extensions, again as
>> shown in [1], are present on the message.  There are a total of 6 possible
>> extensions to MessageType1, each of which is a single primitive value, such
>> as an int or a string.  There tends to be no more than 3 of the 6 possible
>> extensions used at any give time.
>>
>> The top two mergeFrom hot spots take ~32% of execution time, the test is
>> the transmission of 1.85M objects of MessageType2 from client to server.
>>  These are bundled in roughly 64k chunks, using 58 top level MessageType3
>> objects.
>>
> You can try the new parser API introduced in 2.5.0rc1, i.e., use
> MessageType3.parseFrom()  instead of the Builder API to parse the message.
> Another option is to simplify the message structure. Instead of nesting
> many small MessageType2 in MessageType3, you can simply put the repeated
> extensions in MessageType3.
>

This sounds good, I will try both of these options.

Is 2.5.0rc1 fairly stable?

Thanks.

Michael


>
>
>> Obviously all of the hot spot methods are auto-generated (Java).  There
>> might be some hand changes I could make to that code, but if I ever
>> re-generate, then i'd lose that work.  I am wondering if there are any
>> tricks or changes that could be made to improve the parse time of the
>> messages?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> [1] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/techniques
>>
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>>
>
>

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