Object communication vs String using RabbitMQ and Mule

Question

I'm working on a project using mule and rabbitmq. The scenario is that, my application listens to a queue ,processes the message and then responses it. My question is, whether receiving java object, using mule "byte-array-to-object-transformer" and returning the response object might have better performance than receiving json, transforming it to the related object then transforming the response again and returning the json back. I think it depends on rabbitmq mechanism and mule transformers both.

Answer 1

Rule #1 of performance issues: You do not have a performance issue until you can prove you have one.

This said, here is an interesting bit from https://github.com/RichardHightower/json-parsers-benchmark/wiki/Serialization-Jackson-vs.-Boon-vs.-Java-Serialization :

Most people assume that Java object serialization is faster than Jackson JSON serialization because Jackson is using JSON and Java object serialization is binary. But most people are wrong.

Jackson JSON serialization is much faster than built in Java object serialization.

Personally, as a rule of thumb, I try to avoid sending serialized Java objects over the wire because things can break down in horrible ways. It is way more robust to send data over the wire, for example as JSON. Sending data instead of serialized objects allows you to be very lax in the way you deal with it, for example by gracefully dealing with new/unexpected fields instead of dying in a fire because of binary incompatibility.

Answer 2

We use RabbitMQ with serialization (provided by a separate lib). It gives better performance than JSON in terms of message length, but that might not be very important in your case.

A minus of a serialization approach is that all your objects (and all their non transient fields) should be Serializable, which is not always possible. Also, when using serialization, you should always watch that both sending and receiving parts speak the same language i.e. have the same versions of classes.

If you'll decide to go with serialization, check out the FST - that's what we are using and it's a great replacement for the standard Java serialization. It's really easy to use and shows great results for both speed and output size.