CloudFlare uses gob a lot in a latency sensitive way and so I figured I would run my own test with a small program like this. The 'Thing' structure is meant to mirror the sort of items we send using gob.

  package main

  import (
    "bytes"
    "encoding/gob"
    "fmt"
    "time"
  )

  type Thing struct {
    B []byte
    S string
    I int
  }

  func main() {
    var n bytes.Buffer
    e := gob.NewEncoder(&n)

    t := Thing{[]byte(p), p, 42}

    count := 10000000
    mark := time.Now()
    for i := 0; i < count; i++ {
      if err := e.Encode(t); err != nil {
        panic(err)
      }

      n.Truncate(0)
      t.I += 1
    }

    fmt.Printf("%f\n", time.Since(mark).Seconds())
  }

  var p = `` // Cut for space but is a 15,344 byte web page as a string

I had two versions of Go on my machine: 16c93a202587 (http://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=16c93a202587f499... from March 1) and 9d60132d7784 (https://code.google.com/p/go/source/detail?r=9d60132d7784 from yesterday).

Doing 10 runs of each and averaging the reported duration I see:

    16c93a202587: 29.4829122s
    9d60132d7784: 26.4422463s

So, in my test Go 1.1 (represented by 9d60132d7784) is 10% faster than a previous version from March.

Tests were done on a AMD64 Linux.