Benchmarking serialization speed of YAML, JSON, Marshal, and MessagePack in Ruby, JRuby, and Rubinius

benchmark_results.rb

# ruby 2.3.3p222
                  user     system      total        real
YAML         31.860000   0.000000  31.860000 ( 31.886926)
JSON          1.370000   0.000000   1.370000 (  1.374081)
Marshal       0.710000   0.000000   0.710000 (  0.711384)
MessagePack   0.510000   0.000000   0.510000 (  0.505674)

# jruby 9.1.7.0 (2.3.1)
                  user     system      total        real
YAML         26.270000   0.040000  26.310000 ( 25.652204)
JSON          0.740000   0.010000   0.750000 (  0.741911)
Marshal       0.500000   0.000000   0.500000 (  0.504016)
MessagePack   0.360000   0.000000   0.360000 (  0.356285)

# ruby 2.4.0p0
                  user     system      total        real
YAML         28.370000   0.010000  28.380000 ( 28.396227)
JSON          1.230000   0.000000   1.230000 (  1.227030)
Marshal       0.720000   0.000000   0.720000 (  0.713398)
MessagePack   0.470000   0.000000   0.470000 (  0.468230)

serialization_benchmarks.rb

require 'benchmark'
require 'yaml'
require 'json'
require 'msgpack'

Benchmark.bmbm do |bm|
  this_many = 100_000
  this = {aim: true,
          nested: {number: 100_000_000,
                   string: 'my life close twice before...'}}
  
  bm.report 'YAML' do
    this_many.times do
      YAML.load YAML.dump(this)
    end
  end
  
  bm.report 'JSON' do
    this_many.times do
      JSON.parse JSON.generate(this)
    end
  end
  
  bm.report 'Marshal' do
    this_many.times do
      Marshal.load Marshal.dump(this)
    end
  end
  
  bm.report 'MessagePack' do
    this_many.times do
      MessagePack.unpack MessagePack.pack(this)
    end
  end
end