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Comments on Does using an Integer have any speed/performance benefits over a string in JSON
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Does using an Integer have any speed/performance benefits over a string in JSON
I'm working on an API to respond some data about a bunch of orders and items.
The order and item numbers are always an integer (it's the order.id and item.id value, respectively).
Originally the response included each order number and each item number as a string, something like:
{
"orders": [
{
"id": "12345",
"item": [
"123",
"124",
"125",
"126"
]
},
{
"id": "95812",
"item": [
"173",
"198"
]
}
]
}
I instructed the team to make the values as integers rather than strings, that exact response now looks like:
{
"orders": [
{
"id": 12345,
"item": [
123,
124,
125,
126
]
},
{
"id": 95812,
"item": [
173,
198
]
}
]
}
My question is if there is really any purpose to what I've done? We're never going to need to perform any mathematical equations on the number, essentially they are functioning as strings (as far as I'm aware).
Perhaps it's counterproductive because now an order number cannot contain any other character besides a number - but that's anyhow how it works since it's using an INTEGER type in the database.
There's always the smaller and therefor faster response - since there's no ".
In the above example (minified) it's almost 17% smaller.
- string = 96 bytes
- int = 80 bytes
Post
JSON is a standard. Performance is implementation specific and dependent on what is being done with the data. The answer really depends on what your environment is.
Some languages may have slight performance benefits from using integers when allocating memory during JSON serialisation/deserialisation. Allocating to String types might be done on the heap whereas true int types are a primitive datatype and will be allocated on the stack. Allocating memory on the heap is slower than allocation to the stack. Of course, if the JSON environment de/serialises everything on the heap then there will be practically no difference in allocation time.
Ultimately such savings will be minute and should probably be considered premature optimisation. Deciding whether to use strings or ints will likely have far more profound effects on development time and code robustness than performance.
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