JSON Parsing Speed Test: YAJL vs SBJSON (iPhone Edition)

gabe — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 06:18:57 +0000

I was curious about the difference, if any, in performance between SBJSON and YAJL with Objective-C bindings. SBJSON is a strict JSON parser written in Objective-C. YAJL is a small event-driven (SAX-style) JSON parser written in ANSI C. Awhile back I wrote YAJL Objective-C bindings and I did some very basic speed tests on JSON data from twitter, delicious, last.fm and yelp. I ran these tests on the original, 3G and 3GS iPhones.

The SBJSON test ran NSString#JSONValue, and the equivalent YAJL test ran NSData#yajl_JSON. The YAJL bindings operate directly on NSData, and this makes a bit more sense since we usually have NSData first, whereas for SBJSON you have to decode to a string before parsing. I didn’t include this difference in my tests though.

These are tests of parsing only (and not loading of any data or strings) of the 4 APIs datasets run 100 times on the original iPhone, 3G and 3GS:

So the YAJL framework gives about a 60% speed increase. The YAJL Objective-C bindings can be found on github.

Be sure to thank @lloydhilaiel for making YAJL full of so much awesomeness.

Update: The project used to do the perf test can be found here.

rel=me » sbjson

JSON Parsing Speed Test: YAJL vs SBJSON (iPhone Edition)