Fast and compact object serialization in .NET

Question

I want to use object serialization to communicate over the network between a Mono server and Silverlight clients. It is pretty important that serialization is space efficient and pretty fast, as the server is going to host multiple real time games.

What technique should I use? The BinaryFormatter adds a lot of overhead to serialized classes (Version, culture, class name, property names, etc.) that is not required within this application.

What can I do to make this more space efficient?

Answer 1

You can use Protocol Buffers. I'm changing all my serialization code from BinaryFormatter with compression to Protocol Buffers and obtaining very good results. It's more efficient in both time and space.

There are two .NET implementations by Jon Skeet and Marc Gravell.

Update: Official .NET implementation can be found here.

Answer 2

I have some benchmarks for the leading .NET serializers available based on the Northwind dataset.

@marcgravell binary protobuf-net is the fastest implementations benchmarked that is about 7x faster than Microsoft fastest serializer available (the XML DataContractSerializer) in the BCL.

I also maintain some open-source high-performance .NET text serializers as well:

• JSV TypeSerializer a compact, clean, JSON+CSV-like format that's 3.1x quicker than the DataContractSerializer
• as well as a JsonSerializer that's 2.6x quicker.