Typically, the difference between equivalent JSON and Protobuf payloads that have been gzipped is quite small. It can even be that the gzipped Protobuf payload

Typically, the difference between equivalent JSON and Protobuf payloads that have been gzipped is quite small. It can even be that the gzipped Protobuf payload is larger than gzipped JSON one. Granted, there's less data to decompress out of it, which may mean a faster decompression stage, but I'm not sure that's a bottleneck in the first place. So, do they not compress requests between microservices? Otherwise, how did they see such a reduction?