frsyuki

My thoughts on MessagePack

Hi. My name is Sadayuki "Sada" Furuhashi. I am the author of the MessagePack serialization format as well as its implementation in C/C++/Ruby.

Recently, MessagePack made it to the front page of Hacker News with this blog entry by Olaf, the creator of the Facebook game ZeroPilot. In the comment thread, there were several criticisms for the blog post as well as MessagePack itself, and I thought this was a good opportunity for me to address the questions and share my thoughts.

My high-level response to the comments

To the best of my understanding, roughly speaking, the criticisms fell into the following two categories.

jboner

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
----------------------------------
L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD