BinaryFormatter alternatives

Question

A BinaryFormatter-serialized array of 128³ doubles, takes up 50 MB of space. Serializing an array of 128³ structs with two double fields takes up 150 MB and over 20 seconds to process.

Are there fast simple alternatives that would generate compact files? My expectation is that the above examples would take up 16 and 32 MB, respectively, and under two seconds to process. I took a look at protobuf-net, but it appears that it does not even support struct arrays.

PS: I apologize for making a mistake in recording file sizes. The actual space overhead with BinaryFormatter is not large.

Answer 1

Serializing means that metadata is added so that the data can be safely deserialized, that's what's causing the overhead. If you serialize the data yourself without any metadata, you end up with 16 MB of data:

foreach (double d in array) {
   byte[] bin = BitConverter.GetBytes(d);
   stream.Write(bin, 0, bin.Length);
}

This of course means that you have to deserialize the data yourself also:

using (BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(stream)) {
   for (int i = 0; i < array.Length; i++) {
      byte[] data = reader.ReadBytes(8);
      array[i] = BitConverter.ToDouble(data, 0);
   }
}

Answer 2

This is more of a comment but it's way too much for one... I'm not able to reproduce your results. There is, however, some additional overhead with the struct.

My testing:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Testing array of structs

Size of double:  8
Size of doubles.bin:  16777244
Size per array item:  8
Milliseconds to serialize:  143
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Testing array of structs

Size of dd struct:  16
Size of structs.bin:  52428991
Size per array item:  25
Milliseconds to serialize:  9678
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace ConsoleApplication5
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            TestDoubleArray();
            TestStructArray();
        }

        private static void TestStructArray()
        {

            Stopwatch stopWatch = new Stopwatch();
            stopWatch.Start();

            dd[] d1 = new dd[2097152];
            BinaryFormatter f1 = new BinaryFormatter();
            f1.Serialize(File.Create("structs.bin"), d1);

            stopWatch.Stop();

            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
            Debug.WriteLine("Testing array of structs");
            Debug.WriteLine("");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of dd struct:  " + System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(dd)).ToString());
            FileInfo fi = new FileInfo("structs.bin");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of structs.bin:  " + fi.Length.ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Size per array item:  " + (fi.Length / 2097152).ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Milliseconds to serialize:  " + stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
        }

        static void TestDoubleArray()
        {
            Stopwatch stopWatch = new Stopwatch();
            stopWatch.Start();

            double[] d = new double[2097152];
            BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter();
            f.Serialize(File.Create("doubles.bin"), d);

            stopWatch.Stop();

            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
            Debug.WriteLine("Testing array of structs");
            Debug.WriteLine("");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of double:  " + sizeof(double).ToString());
            FileInfo fi = new FileInfo("test.bin");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of doubles.bin:  " + fi.Length.ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Size per array item:  " + (fi.Length / 2097152).ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Milliseconds to serialize:  " + stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
        }

        [Serializable]
        struct dd
        {
            double a;
            double b;
        }
    }
}