Interesting, thanks so much for the response. I'll keep this in mind as I continue to develop my app. It's still between custom byte stream, json, thrift, etc.

But MsgPack looks interesting as well and, if anything, these blog posts have brought it into the light for me.

I looked at the java class and what might help is if you can set a buffer size and use that buffer to store the data in the buffer and expand it if necessary. But that seems like a lot of work. But yeah, not sure if you can optimize based on usage patterns due to the constraint you said. In any case, great stuff and thanks for the info.