JBB Performance

In the javascript world there quite few binary encoding projects. The most widespread ones are the Binary-JSON (BSON) and MessagePack file formats. Even though they are not directly targeting Javascript applications, they are available as npm modules for both node.js and the browser.

For this performance tests we tested these technologies for a variety of data sets. It was surprising to see that JBB outperformed the other two both in file size and loading speed.

The encoding time of JBB is slower because of the way the bundles are created: Each one of it's four data streams are written into 4 individual files and then merged into the final bundle. In addition, JBB is not a streaming format, requiring some additional time to compile it's internal lookup tables.

Set-Up

For this performance tests we compared the following various binary encoders available on npm for javascript applications:

• Native JSON
• jbb v1.3.7
• msgpack v1.0.2
• bson v0.4.23

For the following data:

1. Low-resolution Country Polygons (GeoJSON) (251K)
2. High-resolution Country Polygons (GeoJSON) (673K)
3. Randomly generated JSON, mostly with strings (961K)
4. 50,000 times repeated instance of { 'abcdef' : 1, 'qqq' : 13, '19' : [1, 2, 3, 4] } (1.8M)
5. 50,000 times repeated instance of { 'abcdef' : Math.random(), 'qqq' : 13, '19' : [Math.random(), Math.random(), Math.random(), Math.random()] } (5.9M)

Results

We compared the output file size and and loading time. The results are the following:

A. Encoding/Decoding Time

Data	JSON		BSON		MsgPack		JBB
	Encode	Decode	Encode	Decode	Encode	Decode	Encode	Decode
1	5.784ms	4.428ms	33.713ms	32.986ms	6.021ms	8.770ms	127.750ms	7.962ms
2	8.444ms	13.871ms	41.690ms	48.039ms	14.350ms	18.508ms	215.315ms	18.269ms
3	5.110ms	13.339ms	33.584ms	30.697ms	18.537ms	16.346ms	186.009ms	18.545ms
4	59.316ms	84.020ms	237.391ms	404.492ms	151.971ms	153.366ms	294.919ms	5.308ms
5	117.916ms	111.693ms	304.340ms	368.778ms	168.251ms	186.816ms	539.299ms	79.913ms

B. Encoded File Size

We also tested how well the file gets compressed, since GZip compression can be transparently applied on HTTP data. Each file was compressed at maximum GZip compression (-9).

Data	JSON		BSON		MsgPack		JBB
	Raw	GZip	Raw	GZip	Raw	GZip	Raw	GZip
1	251K	101K	349K	172K	214K	146K	110K	70K
2	588K	204K	534K	207K	361K	184K	157K	78K
3	752K	210K	801K	238K	667K	220K	523K	166K
4	1,806K	5.4K	3,407K	129K	977K	2.5K	104B	118B
5	6,023K	2,290K	4,384K	1,575K	2,930K	1,360K	1,074K	877K

C. Summary

• JBB is about 70% faster than Binary-JSON (BSON) and about 30% faster than MsgPack on decoding speed, even with one negative test-case (#3).
• JBB creates files that (even their compressed versions) are about 61% smaller than Binary-JSON (BSON) and about 55% smaller than MsgPack.

Reference Scripts

The following code snippets were used to measure the numbers above:

Loaders & Generators

For loading the sample JSON files:

var fs = require('fs');
var _data = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('data.json', 'utf8'));

For generating dataset 4:

var _data = [];
for (var i=0; i<50000; i++) {
  _data.push(
    { 'abcdef' : 1, 'qqq' : 13, '19' : [1, 2, 3, 4] }
  );
}

For generating dataset 5:

var _data = [];
for (var i=0; i<50000; i++) {
  _data.push(
    { 'abcdef' : Math.random(), 'qqq' : 13, '19' : [Math.random(),Math.random(),Math.random(),Math.random()] }
  );
}

Encoder & Decoder

For JSON:

// Write down JSON
console.time('Write JSON');
fs.writeFileSync('test-data.json', JSON.stringify(_data))
console.timeEnd('Write JSON');

// Read json
console.time('Read JSON');
_saved = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync('test-data.json'));
console.timeEnd('Read JSON');

For BSON:

var bson = require("bson");
var BSON = new bson.BSONPure.BSON();

// Write down BSON 
console.time('Write BSON');
fs.writeFileSync('test-data.bson', BSON.serialize(_data, false, true, false) );
console.timeEnd('Write BSON');

// Read BSON
console.time('Read BSON');
_saved = BSON.deserialize(fs.readFileSync('test-data.bson'));
console.timeEnd('Read BSON');

For MsgPack:

var msgpack = require('msgpack');

// Write down MSGPACK 
console.time('Write MsgPack');
fs.writeFileSync('test-data.msgpack', msgpack.pack(_data) );
console.timeEnd('Write MsgPack');

// Read MSGPACK
console.time('Read MsgPack');
_saved = msgpack.unpack(fs.readFileSync('test-data.msgpack'));
console.timeEnd('Read MsgPack');

For JBB:

var JBBEncoder = require('jbb/encoder');
var JBBDecoder = require('jbb/decoder');

// Write down JBB
console.time('Write JBB');
var bundle = new JBBEncoder("test-data.jbb");
bundle.encode( _data, 'countries' );
bundle.close();
console.timeEnd('Write JBB');

// Read JBB
console.time('Read JBB');
var bundle = new JBBDecoder("./");
bundle.add('test-data.jbb');
bundle.load(function(err, db) {
  console.timeEnd('Read JBB');
});