Are there protobuf throughput benchmarks somewhere? I haven't been able to verify that they're faster than JSON.
Edit: I was able to find these at https://github.com/hnakamur/protobuf-deb/blob/master/docs/pe... but these numbers don't seem conclusive. Protobuf decode throughput for most schemas tested is much slower than JSON, but protobufs will probably also be a bit smaller. One would have to compare decode throughput for the same documents serialized both ways rather than just looking at a table.
Edit: I was able to find these at https://github.com/hnakamur/protobuf-deb/blob/master/docs/pe... but these numbers don't seem conclusive. Protobuf decode throughput for most schemas tested is much slower than JSON, but protobufs will probably also be a bit smaller. One would have to compare decode throughput for the same documents serialized both ways rather than just looking at a table.