JSon.NET is claiming to offer better serialization and deserialization performance than any of the major serializers in .NET including BinaryFormatter. It even performs well against the remarkably fast DataContractSerizalier.
It is no shock that someone was able to beat the somewhat troubled WCF JSON implementation. Not only is it the only library in the benchmark that was slower at serialization than deserialization, its serialization actually takes 6 times longer than its deserialization. The real shocker from the benchmarks is that the BinaryFormatter is relatively slow. Most people would generally assume binary formats are faster, but in these benchmarks both JSON.NET and WCF’s DataContractSerializer are nearly twice as fast at deserialization and easily three times faster at serialization.
The benchmark results are available on James Newton-King’s blog. Json.NET is being released on CodePlex under the MIT License.