2026-05-07

34kb

Original source

Reading Log X Post Historical Backfill

Imported from historical reading log.

  • Extracted main post via api.fxtwitter.com fallback; the attached image includes the concrete compression results.
  • Sam Rose compares the same payload as JSON (34kb) and protobuf (15kb) and finds that after compression, JSON is often slightly smaller than protobuf for Brotli, Zstd, gzip, and bzip2; protobuf only wins clearly for lz4 and barely for lzma in his sample.
  • Concrete reported sizes from the screenshot: Brotli json 4237 < bin 4279, Zstd 4484 < 4702, gzip 4766 < 4949, bzip2 5208 < 5302, lzma 4500 > 4484, lz4 6245 > 5832.
  • Why it is interesting: it is a good reminder that binary format smaller on disk/wire and binary format compresses smaller are different questions; verbose JSON field names and repeated structure can give compressors more redundancy to exploit.
  • Good discussion angle: protobuf vs JSON size intuition breaks once a strong general-purpose compressor enters the picture.