Improving Facebook’s performance on Android with FlatBuffers

What this post added

This post introduces the adoption of FlatBuffers as a data storage format for Facebook's Android application. It details the performance issues encountered with JSON parsing, such as slow parsing speeds, parser initialization delays, and significant garbage collection pressure. The post explains how FlatBuffers, with its ability to directly access data without full deserialization, addresses these issues. It also describes custom mutation extensions built on FlatBuffers to handle data modifications and the resulting 'Flat Models' architecture that simplifies the integration between UI and storage layers. The post quantifies the performance improvements achieved, including reduced story load times, decreased memory allocations, faster cold starts, and smaller storage size.