Good point. A binary protocol is certainly the ultimate play. Tim has some promising initial estimates, but the gains depend on the document properties (mostl

Good point. A binary protocol is certainly the ultimate play. Tim has some promising initial estimates, but the gains depend on the document properties (mostly size). In the meantime an alternative solution is to spread the server-side load via BigCouch or some other clustering solution. However, I'd wager that even with slow JSON libs most workflows are still IO limited.