C++ Serialization Benchmark

This benchmark suite accompanies the public release of the Cista++ serialization library.

This repository contains benchmarks for C++ (binary & high performance) serialization libraries. The goal was to create a benchmark based on a non-trivial data structure. In this case, we serialize, deserialize and traverse a graph (nodes and edges). Since the goal was to have a data structure containing pointers, we choose an "object oriented" representation of a graph instead of a simple adjacency matrix. Some frameworks do no support cyclic data structures. Thus, instead of having node pointers in the edge object, we just reference start and destination node by their index. Benchmarks are based on the Google Benchmark framework.

This repository compares the following C++ binary serialization libraries:

• Cap’n Proto
• cereal
• Flatbuffers
• Cista++

Other Benchmarks

• Benchmarks de/serialization (Thrift, Protobuf, Boost.Serialization, Msgpack, Cereal, Avro, Capnproto, Flatbuffers, YAS) of two arrays (numbers and strings): https://github.com/thekvs/cpp-serializers
• Rust de/serialization benchmarks (Cap’n Proto vs. Protocol Buffers): https://github.com/ChrisMacNaughton/proto_benchmarks
• FlatBuffers benchmarks: https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/flatbuffers_benchmarks.html

Build & Execute

To run the benchmarks you need a C++17 compatible compiler and CMake. Tested on Mac OS X (but Linux should be fine, too).

git clone --recursive github.com:felixguendling/cpp-serialization-benchmark.git
cd cpp-serialization-benchmark
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make
./cpp-serialization-benchmark

Results

Library	Serialize	Deserialize	Fast Deserialize	Traverse	Deserialize & Traverse	Size
Cap’n Proto	76 ms	0.00 ms	0.0 ms	216 ms	221 ms	50.5M
cereal	216 ms	111.00 ms	-	67 ms	174 ms	37.8M
Cista++ offset	4 ms	0.16 ms	0.0 ms	67 ms	66 ms	25.3M
Cista++ raw	650 ms	24.80 ms	24.8 ms	66 ms	91 ms	176.4M
Flatbuffers	1409 ms	35.70 ms	0.0 ms	75 ms	75 ms	63.0M
zpp_bits	4 ms	6.58 ms	6.6 ms	65 ms	72 ms	37.8M

Cista++ offset describes the "slim" variant (where the edges use indices to reference source and target node instead of pointers).

Exact results can be found here.

Benchmarks were run on Ubuntu 20.04 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, compiled with GCC 11.

Compilation Times

Compilation times are measured with code generation but without building the code generators or static libraries (Cap’n Proto, Flatbuffers).

Library	clang-7 on Mac OS X
Cap’n Proto	0.440s
cereal	1.827s
Cista++ raw	1.351s
Flatbuffers	0.857s

Contribute

You have found a mistake/bug or want to contribute new benchmarks? Feel free to open an issue/pull request! 😃