Benchmarking Ruby’s JSON.load and JSON.parse.

json_benchmark.rb

require 'benchmark'

require 'json'
str = '{"foo": "bar"}'

Benchmark.benchmark Benchmark::CAPTION, 11 do |bm|
  bm.report 'JSON.load' do
    500_000.times { JSON.load(str) }
  end

  bm.report 'JSON.parse' do
    500_000.times { JSON.parse(str) }
  end
end

__END__
                  user     system      total        real
JSON.load     4.840000   0.130000   4.970000 (  4.986769)
JSON.parse    2.410000   0.020000   2.430000 (  2.428971)

Yay JSON.parse!

Did you try with other parsers? Like oj or yajl-ruby?