What is fastest serializer in java?

Question

I need onftenly to serialize big objects to bytes. So it is necessary to have fast serializer for it. Is there is any variants which perform better than java default one?

Answer 1

We use protobuff from google for our serialization needs and it is working great. You can get a comparision of all the serializers (in the world ;-)) here http://code.google.com/p/thrift-protobuf-compare/wiki/Benchmarking

Answer 2

Would you not be best to use the serialization classes in hadoop? If you inherit from Writable, this would let then serialise out in a format that can be moved around easily by hadoop/hbase