Performance Notes

simdjson strives to be at its fastest without tuning, and generally achieves this. However, there are still some scenarios where tuning can enhance performance.

Reusing the parser for maximum efficiency
- Keeping documents around for longer
Server Loops: Long-Running Processes and Memory Capacity
Large files and huge page support
Computed GOTOs

Reusing the parser for maximum efficiency

If you're using simdjson to parse multiple documents, or in a loop, you should make a parser once and reuse it. The simdjson library will allocate and retain internal buffers between parses, keeping buffers hot in cache and keeping memory allocation and initialization to a minimum.

document::parser parser;

// This initializes buffers and a document big enough to handle this JSON.
document::element doc = parser.parse("[ true, false ]"_padded);
cout << doc << endl;

// This reuses the existing buffers, and reuses and *overwrites* the old document
doc = parser.parse("[1, 2, 3]"_padded);
cout << doc << endl;

// This also reuses the existing buffers, and reuses and *overwrites* the old document
document::element doc2 = parser.parse("true"_padded);
// Even if you keep the old reference around, doc and doc2 refer to the same document.
cout << doc << endl;
cout << doc2 << endl;

It's not just internal buffers though. The simdjson library reuses the document itself. document::element, document::object and document::array are references to the internal document. You are only borrowing the document from simdjson, which purposely reuses and overwrites it each time you call parse. This prevent wasteful and unnecessary memory allocation in 99% of cases where JSON is just read, used, and converted to native values or thrown away.

You are only borrowing the document from the simdjson parser. Don't keep it long term!

This is key: don't keep the document&, document::element, document::array, document::object or string_view objects you get back from the API. Convert them to C++ native values, structs and arrays that you own.

Server Loops: Long-Running Processes and Memory Capacity

The simdjson library automatically expands its memory capacity when larger documents are parsed, so that you don't unexpectedly fail. In a short process that reads a bunch of files and then exits, this works pretty flawlessly.

Server loops, though, are long-running processes that will keep the parser around forever. This means that if you encounter a really, really large document, simdjson will not resize back down. The simdjson library lets you adjust your allocation strategy to prevent your server from growing without bound:

You can set a max capacity when constructing a parser:

document::parser parser(1024*1024); // Never grow past documents > 1MB
for (web_request request : listen()) {
  auto [doc, error] = parser.parse(request.body);
  // If the document was above our limit, emit 413 = payload too large
  if (error == CAPACITY) { request.respond(413); continue; }
  // ...
}

This parser will grow normally as it encounters larger documents, but will never pass 1MB.

You can set a fixed capacity that never grows, as well, which can be excellent for predictability and reliability, since simdjson will never call malloc after startup!

document::parser parser(0); // This parser will refuse to automatically grow capacity
parser.set_capacity(1024*1024); // This allocates enough capacity to handle documents <= 1MB
for (web_request request : listen()) {
  auto [doc, error] = parser.parse(request.body);
  // If the document was above our limit, emit 413 = payload too large
  if (error == CAPACITY) { request.respond(413); continue; }
  // ...
}

Large files and huge page support

There is a memory allocation performance cost the first time you process a large file (e.g. 100MB). Between the cost of allocation, the fact that the memory is not in cache, and the initial zeroing of memory, on some systems, allocation runs far slower than parsing (e.g., 1.4GB/s). Reusing the parser mitigates this by paying the cost once, but does not eliminate it.

In large file use cases, enabling transparent huge page allocation on the OS can help a lot. We haven't found the right way to do this on Windows or OS/X, but on Linux, you can enable transparent huge page allocation with a command like:

echo always > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled

In general, when running benchmarks over large files, we recommend that you report performance numbers with and without huge pages if possible. Furthermore, you should amortize the parsing (e.g., by parsing several large files) to distinguish the time spent parsing from the time spent allocating memory.

Computed GOTOs

For best performance, we use a technique called "computed goto" when the compiler supports it, it is also sometimes described as "Labels as Values". Though it is not part of the C++ standard, it is supported by many major compilers and it brings measurable performance benefits that are difficult to achieve otherwise. The computed gotos are automatically disabled under Visual Studio.

If you wish to forcefully disable computed gotos, you can do so by compiling the code with -DSIMDJSON_NO_COMPUTED_GOTO=1. It is not recommended to disable computed gotos if your compiler supports it. In fact, you should almost never need to be concerned with computed gotos.

Number parsing

Some JSON files contain many floating-point values. It is the case with many GeoJSON files. Accurately parsing decimal strings into binary floating-point values with proper rounding is challenging. To our knowledge, it is not possible, in general, to parse streams of numbers at gigabytes per second using a single core. While using the simdjson library, it is possible that you might be limited to a few hundred megabytes per second if your JSON documents are densely packed with floating-point values.

When possible, you should favor integer values written without a decimal point, as it simpler and faster to parse decimal integer values.
When serializing numbers, you should not use more digits than necessary: 17 digits is all that is needed to exactly represent double-precision floating-point numbers. Using many more digits than necessary will make your files larger and slower to parse.
When benchmarking parsing speeds, always report whether your JSON documents are made mostly of floating-point numbers when it is the case, since number parsing can then dominate the parsing time.