The results in the readme are misleading

[bobef]

I just run the benchmark on node 4.x here and msgpack is way slower than JSON.

↪ ./run_tests test/benchmark/benchmark.js

benchmark.js

msgpack.pack: 7171ms, JSON.stringify: 2373ms
ratio of JSON.stringify/msgpack.pack: 0.33091619021057034
✔ benchmark - JSON.stringify faster than msgpack.pack with array of 1m objects

msgpack.pack: 8614ms, JSON.stringify: 3252ms
ratio of msgpack.pack/JSON.stringify: 2.648831488314883
✔ benchmark - JSON.stringify faster than msgpack.pack over 1m calls

msgpack.unpack: 4959ms, JSON.parse: 1522ms
ratio of JSON.parse/msgpack.unpack: 3.2582128777923787
✔ benchmark - JSON.parse faster than msgpack.unpack over 1m calls

msgpack pack:   6622 ms
msgpack unpack: 9435 ms
json    pack:   2983 ms
json    unpack: 3738 ms

msgpack pack:   13744 ms
msgpack unpack: 28709 ms
json    pack:   3352 ms
json    unpack: 3732 ms

msgpack pack:   11742 ms
msgpack unpack: 24797 ms
json    pack:   3187 ms
json    unpack: 3829 ms

✔ benchmark - output above is from three runs on a 1m element array of objects

msgpack pack:   9234 ms
msgpack unpack: 6004 ms
json    pack:   3019 ms
json    unpack: 1953 ms

msgpack pack:   9205 ms
msgpack unpack: 5706 ms
json    pack:   2491 ms
json    unpack: 1536 ms

msgpack pack:   8342 ms
msgpack unpack: 5194 ms
json    pack:   2471 ms
json    unpack: 1541 ms

✔ benchmark - output above is from three runs of 1m individual calls

OK: 5 assertions (217708ms)

[Nepoxx]

From the readme:

Testing shows that, over 500k iterations, msgpack.pack() is about 5x slower than JSON.stringify(), and msgpack.unpack() is about 3.5x slower than JSON.parse().

That seems consistent with your results, no?

edit: Oh, just noticed the date of the issue. This seems abandoned.