Android Json Parsing Comparison
Summary
I compared popular JSON parsing libraries: GSON, Moshi, and Jackson using both POJOs and AutoValue.
Performance
The performance comparison does not show strong differentiation for POJOs, but GSON tends to lag behind Jackson and Moshi. For AutoValue, Moshi performs the best.
The performance measures require improvement. There needs to be more measurements done on more devices.
Qualitative
The APIs are all similar with POJOs. AutoValue requires more manual wrangling for each to work.
Moshi requires adapters for each of the types and an AdapterFactory. There is a library that generates them for you and setting it up is straight-forward. It's straight-forward to create your own adapter in place of the auto generated one if necessary.
Gson requires an AdapterFactory as well. There is no library, but there is an example gist.
Jackson requires an annotation on each class and on each field.
On the class you need to specify the deserializer (@JsonDeserialize(builder = AutoValue_Story.Builder.class)).
On the fields the JSON property name (@JsonProperty("name")).
Further work
- Test on more devices
- Test with more iterations and see how iterations affect performance
- Test with larger payloads
- Method count comparison
Results
| Name | Average (ms) | Max (ms) | Min (ms) | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AutoGson read | 47.3 | 127 | 35 | |
| AutoGson write | 73.9 | 145 | 57 | |
| 121.2 | 272 | 92 | 485.2 | |
| GSON read | 42.9 | 130 | 30 | |
| GSON write | 70.6 | 143 | 58 | |
| 113.5 | 273 | 88 | 474.5 | |
| Moshi read | 52.6 | 166 | 35 | |
| Moshi write | 34.7 | 97 | 26 | |
| 87.3 | 263 | 61 | 411.3 | |
| AutoMoshi read | 52.7 | 174 | 34 | |
| AutoMoshi write | 33.1 | 89 | 25 | |
| 85.8 | 263 | 59 | 407.8 | |
| AutoJackson read | 80.9 | 277 | 45 | |
| AutoJackson write | 59.1 | 198 | 36 | |
| 140 | 475 | 81 | 696 | |
| Jackson read | 50 | 210 | 27 | |
| Jackson write | 39.9 | 154 | 21 | |
| 89.9 | 364 | 48 | 501.9 |
Results taken from reading and writing 157K in memory 10 times on a Samsung Note 4 (Snapdragon) running LineageOS 7.1.
I chose 10 iterations because it seemed representative of app usage.