How Does Protocol Buffering (Protobuf) Compare to JSON for High-Throughput Market Data?

Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) is a language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data. It is significantly faster and produces much smaller message sizes than JSON because it is a binary format.

JSON is text-based, human-readable, and slower to parse. For high-throughput market data feeds where every byte and microsecond counts, Protobuf offers superior performance and bandwidth efficiency.