The test highlights an issue not covered by micro- benchmarking: Encoding and Decoding should perform similar, as factual throughput is determined by

The test highlights an issue not covered by micro- benchmarking: Encoding and Decoding should perform similar, as factual throughput is determined by Min(Encoding performance, Decoding performance). For unknown reasons JDK serialization manages to encode the message tested like 500_000 times per second, decoding performance is only 80_000 per second so in the test the receiver gets dropped quickly: At 500,000 messages/sec you can burn 6000 cycles per message on a 3Ghz core. Probably he has a problem with malloc during the decoding phase. Every malloc and every free costs between 300 (best case) and several thousand cycles (syscall is required).