The CPU on the Pi 4 isn't that weak. Consider that on processors from well over a decade ago, protobufs were being parsed & encoded at data rates that were easi

The CPU on the Pi 4 isn't that weak. Consider that on processors from well over a decade ago, protobufs were being parsed & encoded at data rates that were easily an order of magnitude more than what gigabit ethernet can support. I don't have a Pi 4 to test on, but I've benchmarked protobuf parsing on machines with far less CPU power, and we measured the parsing times for protobufs in nanoseconds, not milliseconds. Considering the limitations of the I/O subsystem, you're going to have a hell of a time sending data to & from the CPU fast enough to keep up with the rate it parses protobufs. It's a "given" in the sense that it's a "given" that Raspberry Pi 4's can saturate a gigabit ethernet network.