Cian Butler

We like to use open source software where possible or use SaaS where possible because there's only so many people we have.

So I started Googling because I knew a solution to the JSON serialization already.

Back in two jobs ago, back when I worked in video games, we had a very large logging pipeline where we would serialize everything to JSON across the whole fleet.

And so we were also a Python shop, and I was working on the metrics team.

And we rolled out a logging change that switched how we serialize JSON in all of our microservices with a Rust library called orjson.

Oh, yeah.

It's a great library.

Well, it's a Rust library and a Python library.

It's written in Rust, and it's got nice Python bindings that look similar enough to the normal ones, the normal JSON Python bindings.

So I knew from then that the speedup

Varies somewhere between 7 and 10x, depending on what you're doing and what it looks like.

And I know that when we did the change in that company, I saw...

about a 1% to 2% change of CPU usage across our data center over a couple weeks.

It takes time for changes to go out, but we definitely saw improvements.

And at that scale, it was really important to kind of like, you get a lot of, those small gains, they really add up over time.

So I reached for that library because I had such success with it before.

And when we went to reach for it, it turns out Django already has a wrapper for it.

It was even easier than that.

So we installed the Django or JSON serialization library.

And it swapped out our JSON serialization, which is just the normal Python JSON serialization with a Rust-based one.