Ruby JSON Libraries

Over the last 5 years or so I'd been away from the world of Ruby. I still used Ruby at work and home for various little things [cos it's awesome!] but that's quite different to living in it, especially seeing its community is one of the most fast-paced I've seen. So when I came back recently and I needed a JSON library, I went searching and found (what felt like) 100 different JSON libraries...

Long story short, I benchmarked them. Feel free to skip to the end of this post to just get the conclusion and be on your way.

What Was Used

NAME	VERSION	BUILD
MRI Ruby	1.9.3p125	ruby 1.9.3p125 (2012-02-16 revision 34643) [x86_64-linux]
JRuby	1.6.7	jruby 1.6.7 (ruby-1.9.2-p312) (2012-02-22 3e82bc8) (OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM 1.7.0_03-icedtea) [linux-amd64-java]
"	1.7.0.dev	jruby 1.7.0.dev (ruby-1.9.3-p139) (2012-04-15 b4b38d4) (Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM 1.7.0_03) [linux-amd64-java]
OpenJDK	1.7.0_03	OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea7 2.1) (ArchLinux build 7.b147_2.1-3-x86_64) OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 22.0-b10, mixed mode)
Oracle Java	1.7.0_03	java version "1.7.0_03" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_03-b04) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 22.1-b02, mixed mode)
MultiJson	1.3.2	c73bc389fa1b0b1c0b8225ea77ff3e2dee312304

The following JSON libraries were tested:

NAME	GEM NAME	VERSION
Optimized JSON (Oj)	oj	1.2.4
YAJL	yajl-ruby	1.1.0
JSON JRuby	json-jruby	1.5.0
JSON Pure	json_pure	1.6.6
JSON gem	json	1.6.6
OkJson	okjson	Version packaged with MultiJson 1.3.2

I created a little app to benchmark each library that performs two functions 100,000 times and records the time taken. Said two functions are:

1. [Writing] Generates JSON for Ruby data structure:

   {
     a: 2,
     b: (1..50).to_a, # i.e. an array of 1,2,3,4,5,6, ... ,49,50
     c: %w[asf xcvb sdfg sdf gfsd],
     d: {
       omg: 'hedfasgdsfg',
       wewr: 34,
       sfgjbsdf: %w[sdfg sdfgsdfgnj klj kj hkuih ui hu kjb bkj b sdfg],
     },
   }

2. [Reading] Parses this JSON:

   {"a":2, "b":[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50], "c":["asf","xcvb","sdfg","sdf","gfsd"], "d":{"omg":"hedfasgdsfg", "wewr":34, "sfgjbsdf":["sdfg","sdfgsdfgnj","klj","kj","hkuih","ui","hu","kjb","bkj","b","sdfg"]}}

If you're interested you can grab the code here: https://github.com/japgolly/WebServerBenchmark/tree/json_libraries
You're free to read it, play with it, hack it, print it and eat it, make love to it; It's all good.

Finally, these tests were performed on a Q9550 with 8GB RAM running Arch Linux 64-bit.

➤ uname -a
Linux golly-desktop 3.3.2-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Apr 14 09:48:37 CEST 2012 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

Results: First Cut

The numeric axis represents number of seconds taken to perform 100,000 operations.
Less is better.

	Linear Graph	Logarithmic Graph
MRI
JRuby (on Oracle Java)

Wow. Two things are immediately obvious:

1. OkJson is extremely slow on both Ruby implementations. Whatever its design goals, performance isn't one of them.
2. JRuby runs YAJL like my grandmother runs marathons.

I really thought JRuby would perform better. Maybe 1.7 will be better. I know the JRuby team expect significant performance gains; I wonder if they've implemented them yet... Let's try using the latest dev version of JRuby 1.7.0!

Also I think I'll try using JRuby 1.6.7 with the OpenJDK implementation of Java and see if that gives better results.

Results: Lots of JRuby Love

[Update 2012-04-23: New JRuby library discovered, see conclusion.]

Alrighty, done. Here are the results: (note: using a logarithmic scale here again) And the same thing expressed differently:

Jeez, it's not getting much better for JRuby...

Ok, enough of this. Let's get rid of the council-working options [hey, Aussies get that!] and just look at the feasible ones.

Results: The Finalists

The numeric axis represents number of seconds taken to perform 100,000 operations.
Less is better.

Conclusion

If you use MRI, use Oj unless you generate more JSON than you parse, in which case use YAJL.

If you use JRuby, you've only really got one choice: json-jruby. You can expect roughly the same performance with OpenJDK, Oracle Java and the latest dev build of JRuby.

Update 2012-04-23: jrjackson for JRuby is approx 4x faster than json-jruby and faster than MRI. If you use JRuby, you want this!!