How to minimalize size of serialized data

Question

I need to minimalize size of serialized class. As I understand size of serialized data depends on names of properties.
So class

class XYZ
{
public int X { get;set;}
}

is smaller after serialization than

class XYZ
{
public int NumberOfUsersWithAccessToReportingService { get;set;}
}

Is there a way to mimimalize size of second class without changing names of properties to shorter versions like in first example? I need this to store data in Server.Cache so it is binary serialization.

http://code.google.com/p/protobuf-net/ could be a good candidate — Guillaume86, Mar 13 '11 at 18:47

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 13 '11 at 18:28

3

If you are using XML Serialisation, yes you can:

class XYZ
{
    [XmlElement("X")]
    public int NumberOfUsersWithAccessToReportingService { get;set;}
}

if it is a binary serialization, there is no need for it.

answered Mar 13 '11 at 18:28

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re your last line; that isn't quite true, or rather: it depends on the serializer. protobuf won't care, but BinaryFormatter uses field-names, and field-names *generally* depend on property-names, especially for automatically implemented properties. – Marc Gravell Mar 13 '11 at 19:32

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

If size is your aim, something terse like protobuf would be good; consider some measures: Performance Tests of Serializations used by WCF Bindings

In your case, using protobuf-net:

[ProtoContract]
class XYZ
{
    [ProtoMember(1)]
    public int NumberOfUsersWithAccessToReportingService { get;set;}
}

The size doesn't depend on the member-names, it is pure-binary, there are no text overheads, and it uses efficient encodings for most data types. Example usage:

using(var file = File.Create(path))
{
    Serializer.Serialize(file, obj);
}
...
using(var file = File.OpenRead(path))
{
    var obj = Serializer.Deserialize<YourType>(file);
}

In fact, the above type will be somewhere between 2 and 6 bytes, depending on the value of the property (integers close to 0 take less space).

@Korin - to be fair, while I might have *implemented* that one, the *design* there was Google... — Marc Gravell, Mar 14 '11 at 11:57

How to minimalize size of serialized data

2 Answers2