This was done as part of this investigation
Varying output sizes
Doesn't work
Comparing TSV, Gzip and JSON Array using the 0.78 MB file of wordsOnly.json, Gzip came up on top.
The compression rate is 60% for TSV, 47% for JsonArray, 85% for Gzip. They are similar in terms of needing to parse (with TSV.parse(data), JSON.parse(data), const data = zlib.gunzip(gzipData) + JSON.parse(data)). TSV requires an additional library (TSV) to do the parsing, whereas JSON and zlib comes with JS / NodeJS. The performance for Gzip, although it does need more memory to do the processing, is the fastest of the lot.
For understanding the Memory Usage, see here.
> node ./src/gzip
In-memory size 0.54 MB
Stringify 1.55 MB
Gzipped in memory 0.9 MB
File size: 0.11 MB
===========Memory Usage===========
rss 42.37 MB
heapTotal 21.88 MB
heapUsed 13.54 MB
external 2.59 MB
==========Elapsed Time==========
0 s, 121.631 ms
> node ./src/tsv.js
Just words In memory 0.54 MB
TSV 0.61 MB
File size: 0.31 MB
TSV to JSON: 0.54 MB
===========Memory Usage===========
rss 42.27 MB
heapTotal 26.45 MB
heapUsed 11.5 MB
external 0.78 MB
==========Elapsed Time==========
0 s, 182.240 ms
> node ./src/jsonArray.js
Just words In memory 0.54 MB
Stringified 0.82 MB
File size: 0.41 MB
String to JSON 0.54 MB
===========Memory Usage===========
rss 36.71 MB
heapTotal 17.8 MB
heapUsed 10.56 MB
external 0.78 MB
==========Elapsed Time==========
0 s, 221.286 ms
> node ./src/tsvStream.js
Just words In memory 0.54 MB
TSV: 0.61 MB
File size: 0.31 MB
===========Memory Usage===========
rss 46.31 MB
heapTotal 25.76 MB
heapUsed 10.83 MB
external 0.97 MB
==========Elapsed Time==========
0 s, 228.903 ms