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> Protobuf's python performance was abysmal — over 10x worse than Thrift.

This is still true of the official implementation from Google, which is pure Python. That's why I wrote the Python half of lwpb [1], and why the Greplin guys wrote fast-python-pb [2]. Both are about 10x faster than the Google Python implementation, so I'd guess on par with Thrift now.

[1] https://github.com/acg/lwpb

[2] https://github.com/Greplin/fast-python-pb/tree/master/benchm...

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Does anyone by any chance know if there is a version of the riak python driver that does not use google's protobuf implementation? I'm looking into using riak and hearing this does not exactly instill confidence, as riak uses google's protobuf implementation and http as its two communication protocols.

Take this for what it is (anectdotal evidence) but I found that write performance with python+riak was abysmal, while read performance wasn't as bad.

Unfortunately I didn't have time to hack the riak driver to use a non-google protocol buffer implementation before my deadlines, but it should be do-able.

Google has an experimental but in my experimenting very stable version of PB that is a C++ extension for Python so you get pretty much the same speed as C++.

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