BinaryFormatter alternatives

Question

A BinaryFormatter-serialized array of 128³ doubles, takes up 50 MB of space. Serializing an array of 128³ structs with two double fields takes up 150 MB an

Answer 1

This is more of a comment but it's way too much for one... I'm not able to reproduce your results. There is, however, some additional overhead with the struct.

My testing:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Testing array of structs

Size of double:  8
Size of doubles.bin:  16777244
Size per array item:  8
Milliseconds to serialize:  143
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Testing array of structs

Size of dd struct:  16
Size of structs.bin:  52428991
Size per array item:  25
Milliseconds to serialize:  9678
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary;
using System.IO;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace ConsoleApplication5
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            TestDoubleArray();
            TestStructArray();
        }

        private static void TestStructArray()
        {

            Stopwatch stopWatch = new Stopwatch();
            stopWatch.Start();

            dd[] d1 = new dd[2097152];
            BinaryFormatter f1 = new BinaryFormatter();
            f1.Serialize(File.Create("structs.bin"), d1);

            stopWatch.Stop();

            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
            Debug.WriteLine("Testing array of structs");
            Debug.WriteLine("");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of dd struct:  " + System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(dd)).ToString());
            FileInfo fi = new FileInfo("structs.bin");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of structs.bin:  " + fi.Length.ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Size per array item:  " + (fi.Length / 2097152).ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Milliseconds to serialize:  " + stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
        }

        static void TestDoubleArray()
        {
            Stopwatch stopWatch = new Stopwatch();
            stopWatch.Start();

            double[] d = new double[2097152];
            BinaryFormatter f = new BinaryFormatter();
            f.Serialize(File.Create("doubles.bin"), d);

            stopWatch.Stop();

            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
            Debug.WriteLine("Testing array of structs");
            Debug.WriteLine("");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of double:  " + sizeof(double).ToString());
            FileInfo fi = new FileInfo("test.bin");
            Debug.WriteLine("Size of doubles.bin:  " + fi.Length.ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Size per array item:  " + (fi.Length / 2097152).ToString());
            Debug.WriteLine("Milliseconds to serialize:  " + stopWatch.ElapsedMilliseconds);
            Debug.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------------------------------");
        }

        [Serializable]
        struct dd
        {
            double a;
            double b;
        }
    }
}