PostgreSQL JSON field performance with large documents
In PostgreSQL 9.3, performance will be fairly poor for large json documents. The whole document must be parsed in order to access a field, index an array, etc. It's stored on disk as a simple text representation, the json text.

PostgreSQL 9.4 is likely to change this, with support for jsonb storage on disk. It'll still have to read the whole json object from disk to access any part of it, but it won't have the same kinds of parsing overheads you'll see in 9.3. It'll also gain many of the indexing features of hstore.

In 9.3, I strongly suspect that hstore, which is stored in a compact binary representation on disk and supports a variety of indexing features, is much more appropriate for your needs.