https://engineering.fb.com/android/improving-facebook-s-performance-on-android-with-flatbuffers/Conclusion
FlatBuffers is a data format that removes the need for data transformation between storage and the UI. In adopting it, we have also driven additional architectural improvements in our app like Flat Models. The mutation extensions that we built on top of FlatBuffers allow us to track server data, mutations, and local state all in a single structure, which has allowed us to simplify our data model and expose a unified API to our UI components.
In last six months, we have transitioned most of Facebook on Android to use FlatBuffers as the storage format. Some performance improvement numbers include:
Story load time from disk cache is reduced from 35 ms to 4 ms per story.
Transient memory allocations are reduced by 75 percent.
Cold start time is improved by 10-15 percent.
We have reduced storage size by 15 percent.
It’s exciting to see a choice in data format allow people to spend just a little more time reading their friends’ updates and seeing photos of their families. Thanks, FlatBuffers!