Overview

Blixtser is a fast and efficient serialization tool for Java. The goal for this project is speed, efficiency and minimum amount of work required to use it in your production environment.

Disclaimer

Since this project is totally based on using sun.misc.Unsafe you should use it with care! You should be extra careful when it comes to different JVMs and architectures. As a simple example if you serialize something on machine A that has different endianness and internal representation of native integer than machine B that de-serializes the same thing, then you are in big trouble!

Contents

• Quickstart
• Supported Types
• Benchmark

Quickstart

Let's start by checking how to use the library:

Blixtser blixtser = new Blixtser();
blixtser.register(SomeClass.class);
// ...
byte[] serialized = blixtser.serialize(someclass);
SomeClass deserialized = (SomeClass) blixtser.deserialize(serialized);

Supported Types

Blixtser supports the following types out of the box:

• long, long[], long[][], Long
• double, double[], double[][], Double
• float, float[], float[][], Float
• int, int[], int[][], Integer, BigInteger
• char, char[], char[][], Character
• short, short[], short[][], Short
• byte, byte[], byte[][], Byte
• boolean, boolean[], boolean[][], Boolean
• String, String[], String[][], StringBuffer, StringBuilder
• Enum
• Date

Benchmark

We have micro-benchmarked Blixtser against Kryo, fast-serialization and Java built-in serializer using JMH library.

A sample micro-benchmark on a OSx 10.10 (3 GHz Intel Core i7, L2 Cache 256 KB, L3 Cache 4 MB):

Benchmark                    Mode   Samples  Score   Error  Units
-----------------------------------------------------------------
blixtser                     thrpt       10  7,804 ? 0,711  ops/s
fastSerializer               thrpt       10  5,041 ? 0,233  ops/s
java_built_in_serializer     thrpt       10  0,324 ? 0,008  ops/s
kryo                         thrpt       10  4,607 ? 0,311  ops/s

Benchmark                    Mode   Samples  Score   Error  Units
-----------------------------------------------------------------
blixtser                      avgt       10  0,117 ? 0,011   s/op
fastSerializer                avgt       10  0,208 ? 0,024   s/op
java_built_in_serializer      avgt       10  3,109 ? 0,129   s/op
kryo                          avgt       10  0,261 ? 0,061   s/op

Benchmark                    Mode   Samples  Score   Error  Units
-----------------------------------------------------------------
blixtser                    sample       96  0,124 ? 0,007   s/op
fastSerializer              sample       56  0,224 ? 0,021   s/op
java_built_in_serializer    sample       10  3,649 ? 0,460   s/op
kryo                        sample       58  0,219 ? 0,012   s/op

Benchmark                    Mode   Samples  Score   Error  Units
-----------------------------------------------------------------
blixtser                        ss       10  0,151 ? 0,058      s
fastSerializer                  ss       10  0,284 ? 0,163      s
java_built_in_serializer        ss       10  3,248 ? 0,206      s
kryo                            ss       10  0,226 ? 0,007      s

How to run the benchmarks

Simply cd to blixtser-benchmark and run the following:

$ gradle -PbenchmarkName=com.mojang.blixtser.benchmark.MicroBenchmark_AllModes benchmark

License

Distributed under the MIT License