JSON as an Encoding Protocol in a Large Distributed Application

I'm on a project that processes and reports on large sets of aggregatable row based data. There is a primary aggregation service and then many clients who can subscribe to different views of the data from that server. The objects are passed back and forth between the Java server and the C# clients encoded in JSON. We're noticing that the parsing of the objects is taking a lot of time and somewhat memory intensive. H开发者_StackOverflowave others used JSON for this purpose or seen similar behavior?

We used to use straight XML across the wire and had to use custom serialization (ie. manual) for alot of the objects. While not JSON we did have performance hits due to this constraint. Once we migrated all our tech to a similar architecture we were able to switch to binary serialization which worked much better.

However on the objects where we had issues with performance due to size we made some modifications. Since we had access to the code on both ends (and both were c#) we were able to binary serialize the payload and then base64 encode it since it had to be text across the wire. It did help a good bit in terms of object size and the serialization ran a bit faster.

Since you are going from Java to C# you won't really have that luxury. So the only thing I can think of in your case would be to try and optimize your parsing of the JSON response. You may be able to use some code profiling tools to help you identify portions that are causing you performance issues and then try to optimize those. Also, on the deserialize to JSON make sure you use a string builder to build your final string. If you are doing standard concat operations it will kill performance as well.

Also, you might want to check around I have seen on the web several JSON serializers written for c# some may be faster than what you are doing, who knows.

Not sure if that helps you all that much but there is some info from things we have seen with string based message passing.

UPDATE: Just saw this on dotnetkicks: JSON.Net it's an update from james for the json.net serializers. May help out.

I know for java there are any number of opensource JSON serializers and deserializers. We use FlexJSON.

JSON can be expensive to decode. If performance is an issue try using something like Hessian.