HOW LINKEDIN ADOPTED PROTOCOL BUFFERS TO REDUCE LATENCY BY 60%

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

LinkedIn deals with billions of daily requests, so the data serialization protocol it chooses can be very impactful. This post dives into how LinkedIn switched from using the JSON serialization format to Protocol Buffers, reducing p99 latency by 60% for big payloads and throughput by 6.25%. This is mainly because JSON uses a textual format, which requires more network bandwidth and more compute to compress data. One downside of protocol buffers is that they can be hard to debug and update.