> I've worked with both JSON and Protocol Buffers and there is no way that merely changing from JSON to PB would reduce latency by 60%; not on an average reque

> I've worked with both JSON and Protocol Buffers and there is no way that merely changing from JSON to PB would reduce latency by 60%; not on an average request. Clearly other refactorings were undertaken to achieve that speedup. The article notes that this is only for "large payloads", likely an edge case, and the average performance improvement is 6.25% for responses and 1.77% for requests. 1.77%! I get that this is "at scale" but is the additional complexity of all this engineering worth that? How much more difficult is the code to work with now? If it's at all more difficult to reason about, that is going to add to more engineering hours down the road to work with it. I assume tradeoffs like this were taken into account, and it was deemed that a <7% response improvement was worth it.