Re: [boost] [serialization] fast array serialization (10x speedup)

From: Tom Widmer (tom_usenet_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-15 13:12:23

Matthias Troyer wrote:

> Thanks Robert. I appreciate it and also want to apologize if I  
> sounded too harsh. I value the effort you put into the serialization  
> library and just want to make it usable for high-performance  
> applications as well.

Just to add another use case :

Back in 2001 (or so), I had to implement serialization for IPC involving 
message passing between C++ programs on a RTOS (QNX) - the message 
passing was built on shared memory and QNX pulses (v. fast), QNX message 
passing (fast) and posix message queues (medium). Since I was using C++, 
I had a look at an early version of the serialization library (in the 
yahoo boost files section). It was way too slow, since I needed to pass 
serialized message objects that contained arrays of hundreds of POD 
elements between processes, and I was doing this hundreds of times a 
second. I ended up implementing (from scratch) something quite similar 
to the early serialization library, but which had a traits hook for 
optimizing array serialization (and lots of other differences - I 
forget). I achieved the necessary speed increase; it made the difference 
between a system that could handle thousands of digital IO changes per 
second, and one that could handle hundreds.

Tom