How Protobuf Cut Our Video Metadata Payloads by 71% Across Services
php
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Our trend-detection pipeline was choking on JSON. Every two hours a Cloudflare Worker pulls a batch of trending videos, hands them to a Python enrichment job, which writes to a PHP 8.4 service backed by SQLite in WAL mode, which then fans the same records out to a ranking service. The video metadata record itself is small — an ID, a few timestamps, view counts, region codes, a language tag, some engagement ratios. But we were moving millions of them per day, and the JSON representation of that t