Android Json Parsing Comparison

Summary

I compared popular JSON parsing libraries: GSON, Moshi, and Jackson using both POJOs and AutoValue.

Performance

The performance comparison does not show strong differentiation for POJOs, but GSON tends to lag behind Jackson and Moshi. For AutoValue, Moshi performs the best.

The performance measures require improvement. There needs to be more measurements done on more devices.

Qualitative

The APIs are all similar with POJOs. AutoValue requires more manual wrangling for each to work.

Moshi requires adapters for each of the types and an AdapterFactory. There is a library that generates them for you and setting it up is straight-forward. It's straight-forward to create your own adapter in place of the auto generated one if necessary.

Gson requires an AdapterFactory as well. There is no library, but there is an example gist.

Jackson requires an annotation on each class and on each field. On the class you need to specify the deserializer (@JsonDeserialize(builder = AutoValue_Story.Builder.class)). On the fields the JSON property name (@JsonProperty("name")).

Further work

• Test on more devices
• Test with more iterations and see how iterations affect performance
• Test with larger payloads
• Method count comparison

Results

Name	Average (ms)	Max (ms)	Min (ms)	Total
AutoGson read	47.3	127	35
AutoGson write	73.9	145	57
	121.2	272	92	485.2
GSON read	42.9	130	30
GSON write	70.6	143	58
	113.5	273	88	474.5
Moshi read	52.6	166	35
Moshi write	34.7	97	26
	87.3	263	61	411.3
AutoMoshi read	52.7	174	34
AutoMoshi write	33.1	89	25
	85.8	263	59	407.8
AutoJackson read	80.9	277	45
AutoJackson write	59.1	198	36
	140	475	81	696
Jackson read	50	210	27
Jackson write	39.9	154	21
	89.9	364	48	501.9

Results taken from reading and writing 157K in memory 10 times on a Samsung Note 4 (Snapdragon) running LineageOS 7.1.

I chose 10 iterations because it seemed representative of app usage.

References

AutoValue

Moshi

AutoValue Moshi lib

AutoJackson Examples

AutoGson setup