Honestly, gzipped json is likely much smaller than uncompressed protobuf.
If you were going to use a binary protocol, why choose one that has no partial parsing/toc these days. There are much better alternatives IMO (flatbuffers being one of them)
If you were going to use a binary protocol, why choose one that has no partial parsing/toc these days. There are much better alternatives IMO (flatbuffers being one of them)
Likely not. See here for a comparison: https://nilsmagnus.github.io/post/proto-json-sizes/
Btw, binary formats can also be compressed though it typically won't yield the same compression ratio as similar json would since there will be less repeation in the binary format.