Benchmarks

Performance comparisons: ZON vs. JSON vs. Protobuf.

The Core Metric: 18.83ns

In our standardized benchmark (Game Entity Access), accessing a field in ZON takes ~18 nanoseconds. Accessing the same field in JSON takes ~117 nanoseconds.

JSON Access Time

117.43 ns

(Parsing Overhead)

ZON Access Time

18.83 ns

(Direct Memory)

Throughput

When processing millions of entities per second, this difference compounds massively.

Format	Ops / Sec	Scaling Factor
JSON	8.5 Million	1x
ZON	53.1 Million	6.2x

Methodology

The Workload

We simulate a typical “Player” entity in a multiplayer game:

struct Player {
    id: u32,
    name: String,
    score: u32,
    inventory: Vec<String>,
}

The Test Environment

• CPU: Consumer Workstation (Ryzen 5000 series equivalent)
• Memory: DDR4 3200MHz
• OS: Windows 11 / Linux Kernel 6.x

Why is JSON slow?

1. Read String: The CPU must read characters until it finds a quote " or brace }.
2. Parse Number: ASCII "123" must be converted to integer 123.
3. Allocate: New memory is allocated for every string and object.

Why is ZON fast?

1. Jump: The CPU reads a 32-bit integer offset.
2. Read: It jumps exactly to that address.
3. Done: The data is already in the correct binary format (Native Endian).