Stop Reparsing the Same Big JSON Documents: Persist Them as Indexed Binary Instead

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A service loads a 40 MB product catalog from disk every time a worker starts. It parses the JSON into objects, builds a map from SKU to product, and answers price lookups until the next deploy. The parse costs seconds of startup. The object tree often costs several times the file’s size in memory, and every worker holds its own copy. A typical request touches two fields of one product. Multiply that by every deploy, every autoscale event and every cold start. Nothing here is broken. The format was built for exchange and it’s being used as a database.

Data Formats on API Coding

Stop Reparsing the Same Big JSON Documents: Persist Them as Indexed Binary Instead