Optimizing JSON Serialization Performance in Spring Boot with Jackson
I'm getting frustrated with I recently switched to I'm working on a personal project and I'm working on a personal project and Recently started working on a Spring Boot microservice that heavily utilizes JSON serialization for API responses. Testing has shown that the default Jackson serializer can be quite slow when processing large data sets, particularly when returning complex nested objects. Here’s a simplified version of my data structure: ```java public class User { private String name; private List<Address> addresses; } public class Address { private String street; private String city; } ``` I tried tweaking the default configurations in my application by adding the following to my `application.properties` file: ```properties spring.jackson.serialization.fail-on-empty-beans=false spring.jackson.deserialization.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES=false ``` While this did reduce some serialization overhead, the performance still leaves much to be desired, especially with larger `List<Address>` fields. I also explored using `@JsonView` to limit the fields being serialized, but it didn't yield significant improvements. In the quest to enhance performance, I stumbled upon the `ObjectMapper` configurations and decided to register a custom serializer for my `User` class. My attempt looks like this: ```java public class UserSerializer extends StdSerializer<User> { public UserSerializer() { this(null); } public UserSerializer(Class<User> t) { super(t); } @Override public void serialize(User user, JsonGenerator jgen, SerializerProvider provider) throws IOException { jgen.writeStartObject(); jgen.writeStringField("name", user.getName()); jgen.writeArrayFieldStart("addresses"); for (Address address : user.getAddresses()) { jgen.writeStartObject(); jgen.writeStringField("street", address.getStreet()); jgen.writeStringField("city", address.getCity()); jgen.writeEndObject(); } jgen.writeEndArray(); jgen.writeEndObject(); } } ``` After registering this custom serializer in my configuration: ```java @Bean public ObjectMapper objectMapper() { ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper(); SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule(); module.addSerializer(User.class, new UserSerializer()); mapper.registerModule(module); return mapper; } ``` The results still didn’t meet my expectations. Furthermore, since our production environment has specific latency requirements, I’m curious if anyone has tried using alternative libraries like Gson or even protostuff for faster serialization. Any insights on proper configurations or additional optimizations would be greatly appreciated! This is part of a larger application I'm building. What am I doing wrong? I'm using Java stable in this project. I appreciate any insights! My team is using Java for this mobile app. Has anyone dealt with something similar? This is my first time working with Java stable. Thanks for any help you can provide!