MessagePack: It's like JSON. but fast and small.

MessagePack is an efficient binary serialization format. It lets you exchange data among multiple languages like JSON. But it’s faster and smaller. Small integers are encoded into a single byte, and typical short strings require only one extra byte in addition to the strings themselves.

Source: MessagePack: It’s like JSON. but fast and small.

Much faster. Also supported in Redis:

Redis scripting has support for MessagePack because it is a fast and compact serialization format with a simple to implement specification. I liked it so much that I implemented a MessagePack C extension for Lua just to include it into Redis.

— Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis