Hey guys, I've implemented protobuf Serializer/Deserializer for Lilith and have done some more benchmarks: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/lilith/wiki/SerializationPerformance protobuf is really, really fast and creates the smallest data of all tested mechanisms!! Uncompressed protobuf is only slightly larger than compressed java serialization! I'll definitely use it for both my appender and the file format in the next Lilith version... The benchmark code can be found here: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/lilith/browser/trunk/lilith/src/test/java/d... It's using the same LoggingEvents all the time so it has a corpus as suggested below, right? The only problematic bit is that it's using Lilith events and not Logback events but they should be comparable, I think. Feel free to bash me if you know a better way to benchmark this :) The proto file can be found here: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/lilith/browser/trunk/lilith-data/logging-pr... and all protobuf related code is here: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/lilith/browser/trunk/lilith-data/logging-pr... I've also added streamingSerializationWrite and streamingSerializationRead which mimics the way Logbacks SocketAppender is currently serializing. This method has the downside that it's not possible to send separate events to multiple recipients - which I do with my multiplexers - without serializing multiple times. Joern.