gzipping JSON or XML compares relatively favorably against a pure-binary protocol for suitably large messages, but not for pretty small messages. In addition,

gzipping JSON or XML compares relatively favorably against a pure-binary protocol for suitably large messages, but not for pretty small messages. In addition, the speed of the compression stream really becomes an issue if you're sending messages within a cluster. Over the internet your bandwidth and latency will start to become more important, but within a data centre all pure-binary protocols are much faster.