Protobuf parsing in Python | Datadog

This post details the investigation into the performance of Protocol Buffers (protobuf) serialization in Python, specifically for extracting metrics from kube-state-metrics. It covers the basics of protobuf, including defining messages, generating code, and handling streaming multiple messages by prepending message size. The post benchmarks payload sizes for protobuf versus plain text and highlights the performance limitations of the pure Python protobuf implementation, suggesting the use of optimized versions with C++ extensions for significant performance improvements.